


The Things We Lost in the Fire

by Lastactiontricia



Series: The Things We lost in the Fire [1]
Category: Supernatural
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-18
Updated: 2019-08-21
Packaged: 2020-01-16 03:34:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 23,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18513079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lastactiontricia/pseuds/Lastactiontricia





	1. Common Tongue

It had been twenty-six days since you’d woken up in the bunker and set off every alarm they had.  
You’d been cut with a silver knife, splashed with holy water and had all manner of disturbing thrust upon you.  
It was a hell of a twist for someone who just wanted to write for a challenge on Tumblr, and while some small part of you was thrilled, you hadn’t expected to live it first. The awful awe-inspiring terror the Winchesters could inflict doesn’t translate well until you’re at the other side of the guns for real. The ensuing three days after your arrival had been spent in lockup, chained to what you had affectionately called Crowley’s chair before. Not it was just that motherfucking chair.  
Dean was less charming and more annoying; Sam was scarily silent most of time. Both were more scarred, hard men than the show portrayed. Helping with research was about all they let you do, even now that you’d been sprung by Castiel. After a mortifyingly painful soul searching, Castiel was definitely at the top of your shit list.  
Dean had been in a hurry to ship your ass off like an Amazon order until a few days ago. They stopped locking your door at night. You’d wander around the bunker in the lonely hours, exploring, but staying away from either man’s room. Dean had dogged every step, suspicious until he was bored. You almost missed the hulking bulk of him stationed behind you.  
At least it had been quiet.  
During what you were calling “homework time”, Sam was discussing the comparison between your respective volumes, when Dean ran roughshod over your reply- “But that doesn’t make any sense.”  
“It’s not textbook Dean,” your irritation was leaking out because you knew he understood.  
“Well why have translations not match the book.”  
“It’s called vernacular.”  
A raised eyebrow was all you got back and your tolerance for this shit was thin.  
“You know, common tongue.”  
That got him going. Or at least his eyebrow which was now comically rising up and down like it was charming instead of obvious. Does this guy really hook up like this?  
When you stared him down, even after he’d switched to murder face, he turned from you and implored Sam, “C'mon man I need something to kill! All this book shit is boring me to death. Man of action remember?”  
When Cas came thru the library the mood shifted from annoyed to glacier. Snapping your book shut, you skirted around him with enough berth to drive the Titanic thru, which like any potential relationship with Cas, was sunk.  
Dean tailed you, he was good, but not in stealth mode.  
“You gotta forgive him eventually you know.”  
“Do I?”  
“I mean given what you told us you should understand that he’s not a bad guy.”  
“That freaking fist he put in my chest disagrees. I have literally been on fire and it didn’t hurt that bad. That shit was literally the worst thing to ever happen to me. You guys had already run me thru the gauntlet, that shit was unnecessary.”  
Unmovable obstacle meets rock in your locked gazes. He huffs out a laugh when he breaks eye contact.  
“What’s so fucking funny?”  
“I just didn’t understand something my dad told me til just now. Its funny. Inside joke.”  
“I’m in a different universe everything’s an inside joke.”  
He laughs again, more open and mirthful, surprised.  
“You wanna smoke? I could use a smoke,” Dean starts to walk away without getting your answer.  
“Man, I love that you’re really tarnishing the clean cut shit I’m used to seeing, but you think a cigarettes gonna work like a peace treaty?”  
“Wouldn’t hurt.”  
You follow, telling yourself it’s what you would’ve done anyway.  
“So, what else is different?” He eyes you thru the squint of that first drag.  
The doorway you’re huddled next to is small, Sam bitches about the smoke smell and it’s too cold to open the garage. You tap his tattoos, normally covered by layers.  
“These.”  
An eyebrow mocks you, urging you on. You hover over the scars in his throat, close enough to feel the heat coming off his skin, but not actually touch. You ghost up to his eyebrow, your hand dropping away to worry at the scar you had that was eerily similar.  
“Made me prettier,” he cracks a smile. A crooked one, mix of patched dental work and charm. “You always wore that fuckin hoodie before.”  
“Non sequiturs don’t work on me man. Use your words.” You’re tempted to blow the smoke at him, but you’re too tired to start any shit today. Its been a long fucking month and the reality of you being stuck was becoming all too real. Reading too much into this conversation would get you in trouble, and god knows you’d had enough of that. You kept your gaze fixed on the wet and cold outside the door, so close to home, but never farther away.  
“I couldn’t see before. I couldn’t see the similarities. Sam could. Read it on you not long after you dropped here. I had to read it on your skin.”  
He traces finger down your ruined arm, it looks better now but it’s still wrong. That screen door pattern that won’t wear off, those slight ripples where it looks torn. It makes something deep quake, that whisper of a touch where sensation flares up unexpectantly. You stop yourself from snatching it away, but your face changes, something mortifying. He watches you but doesn’t stop.  
“Then there’s this,” that curious finger finds the pearling white of a slash down your other arm, the lines that cross your knuckles that you really have to look for to see. He thumbs your chin next, right in that slight groove that finally tanned away the color, his index finger grace’s over your lip, where without makeup, you can still see the tonal difference of long healed skin. There’s still a bandage on your left arm, the normal one, where Dean cut you with silver. It’s a perfectly straight line above your tattoo on the inside of your wrist.  
He raises your arm up, “sorry,” he breathes and kisses that tattoo. It says One, and you have a feeling he knows what it means when no one else does.  
You back up, face flushing, and steel yourself against this. Dean stays in your space, matching step for step until you’ve run out of retreat. The Impala gleams behind you, cool metal under your hands. Dean stands there, boxing you in, but not threateningly. He’s giving you a moment, the choice to walk away. The words that aren’t said rush between you and when you don’t slip past him, his eyes go dark.  
“I am sorry you know.” He almost breathes it into your mouth, he so close and his voice is so soft.His hand finds the bandage and fiddles it.  
What he’s really saying is -I understand I made you helpless, made you afraid and bleeding. I’m sorry I put you back in that place we both know.  
“Well, I guess you could show me what a penitent man you are.”  
His hands slide from your arms to your hips, holds you like you could moor him in, even at sea. He has you up on the trunk before you can blink and you jolt, forgetting the sheer speed of him when he wants to move. He’s grinning now, a secret smile, full of itself. Its predatory, makes your hind brain stand up, but then he eases down till he’s on his knees. He’s supplicant, but never weak, easing your shoes off-business like. The pants go next and the silence in the room is deafening, each catch of cloth sliding down your legs is so loud.  
When you lay bare, he lays a whole palm on your thigh where the big squares of white scars where they took skin ride along the slope. He traces their edges like a benediction, finds each mar like hunt he’s already solved- connecting the dots on your skin. He shucks his shirt, pants still on as he finds those places his hands traced with his mouth. Like his touch could erase remembered pain. His grip tightens the lower he gets, tightly coiled tension in his shoulders breaking free as he rips the side if your underwear off to get at you. His head dunks down and you feel a whisper of breath there and it makes you shiver with equal fear and want.  
“Whadya call it earlier? Common tongue?” He licks a stripe up through you, pulling you toward his face and locking you down. He does something with his mouth then- a hint of teeth scraping on the edge of pain immediately soothed by what feels like the dirtiest French kiss you very ever received anywhere. It’s too much, you buck up and almost fight him off- this could unravel you. He eyes you over the apex of your thighs, pinning you with a stare.  
“I see you,” he says.  
He takes your hand, holding it a split second before he leans in to place it on his shoulder, a tapestry of ruined skin there matching yours. His entire torso is littered with the graffiti of violence, head to toe- you both look like veterans of some terrible war.  
You marveled over his burn scars- “Rugarou in Des Moines,” he huffs.  
He hovers over the one on the right side of your stomach- “Screwdriver,” you exhale.  
You go down the line making new constellations, making sense of the maps your lives have drawn on your skin. He ends up back where he strayed from, you’re now wetter than your embarrassment can tolerate after these explorations, but Dean growls like a man in pain. He slicks a thumb thru it, swirling, as his mouth laps at you leisurely. He sucks on your clit as he works two fingers in, slowly pumping until it’s easy, and then furiously working them in and out and he does that almost bite again. Each inward stroke of his fingers curls a little more and each pass on your clit gets a bit fiercer until he grunts out- “Let go. Just let go,” -against your clit.  
You do. You see white as it crests over you, letting go like you’ve never allowed yourself. He stands up, the dark is lengthening now as dusk sets in and casts him in vicious shadow. You’re laid back against the rear window, panting and boneless. He gathers you up and kisses you like he has all the time in the world. He tastes like you, and its carnality sweetened with affection, his hand holding your jawline like glass.  
“Nothing common about that was there.”  
You laugh because it’s perfect even though it’s a stupid joke.  
“Stay,” he asks.  
“Dean, you met me at a very strange time in my life,” you manage a laugh that’s shaky.  
“Quoting movies like that is gonna get you all sorts of places.” He quips, taking your hand and dragging you toward home.


	2. Ashes to Ashes

Ashes to ashes

The Things We Lost in the Fire -Series- Part 2  
Common Tongue Sequel 

 

Warnings- This is a darker fic, its not all fun and lady head like the last lol. Violence and explicit language are the minimum for this series, with Dean running a lot more dark than usual.   
words; Dean X Reader

Notes: this fills a square for SPN DARK BINGO- AU Tv Land

 

Another two months down the drain, its April now- complete with Midwest rains that spring up like your temper. Passive aggressive has nothing on you. Even Sam had given up the ghost with research- do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. He’d also given up the good cop routine, matching temper for temper when you threw that initial few days in his face. You’d settled to a silent truce that had developed into a quiet respect. He talks to you about books, marveling over ancient tomes and artifacts. You don’t talk about before, other than the basics, and neither does he; the past is dead and so is the future. When the problem (you) seems to stick, Sam knows to bring you to Target – without asking (and that was a fucking unreal experience being under familiar fluorescent lights with Sam freaking Winchester). You give up and buy the things that make a life. Shampoo- check, better sheets-check, general mental wellbeing- jury's still out. At least you smell like you and don't have dry skin. Sam drives around for a while afterward, knowing this was another thing to let go of, asks you if you want to go home to Illinois, see it for yourself. But seeing that place where your heart was rooted, that would kill something quick that was slowly dying. You tell him no and he understands.  
He doesn’t ask again.

There are cases, Winchesters fading in and out while you kept up the facade of researching ways out of their universe. Sam sighs and finds more books for you. Dean watches you, eyes like fingers crawling over your skin, touching you sometimes-grazing ethereal things, so light you wonder if you imagined it. All the things you don't say make a mess that couldn't be kondo'ed. After that cheeky beginning and a dinner that should've been awkward and wasn't, you'd pulled back. Wondered if you were crazy. Helped Sam with research, did the shopping for Dean with newly minted credit cards so hot they could start a fire with no friction, avoided Castiel who was shaping up to be a good whipping boy. Well at least he seemed to be a good sport about it. Practiced guns with Dean, hand to hand with Sam, each accepting what you avoided. Piling everything on Castiel so you could live with the Winchesters and not scream. 

Sam was kicking your ass. He was patient- correcting you, working out the moves slowly, but he was still kicking your ass. Sweat burns a path from hair to eyes, muscles scream and the fugue of overexertion clouds your mind and gives Sam the opportunity to again knock you back. Half speed for Sam is still above your pay grade.

 

Generally, you had the basics down, you'd had to defend yourself before, but the relative calm of your thirties had made you softer, slower. Those hard edges were polishing out, but the rough grit part wasn’t over. Sam tossed you a water, it hit you and bounced off, teasing a chuckle out of him. When the air went electric, you didn't open your eyes, but your breathing began to hitch a bit, already sore muscles tensing. 

“Taking it easy on her Sammy? Not your style.”  
Sam grunted a response so low it passed you, cracking an eye to peer at Sean incredulously. 

Dean shrugged out of his t-shirt, leaving that last onion skin of a tank top layer. His eyes told you that you better get your ass up. Yours were busy wandering on that exposed skin when his fist whistled into your weak shoulder with enough power to crumple you; the barrage didn't stop there, halfway down you managed to block a knee tunneling toward your stomach but missed the elbow creeping in towards your cheekbone. Taking a knee, you put up your hands in surrender.  
“Giving up so easy? Want me to kiss it better?”  
Shoving up you threw a wild punch which he swatted off.   
“You can kiss my…” you were cut off when Dean swept your feet out from under you.  
“Since you’re offering…” he ran his palm up your ass while blocking your foot from connecting with his groin. He spun you around, locking his forearm under your throat, cutting off air. “We could try this later if you want,” he whispers into your ear, it makes your mind go blank. The world edges toward black when he lets go and you crumple.  
“You're dead,” he nudges you with his foot.   
“Perv,” you mutter back. “Bet your mother would be proud.” You take the opportunity to clip his face, he mostly turns out of it but you bet his ear is ringing.   
He steels over at that, “Again,” he commands.

Sam watches this display with a resignation that makes you worried before he noped right the fuck out of there. He mutters something about taking over gun training-“So you two don’t kill each other. God damn tensions enough” Sam may have been hard, but Dean was punishing.   
Battered and wheezing, you finally managed to crawl out after another hour of Dean's ‘take no prisoners’ training.   
“Chow and then bed- you train with me from now on.”

You stared at him uncomprehending. You'd barely kept up today. “Oh, I'm so fucking sorry, I'd thought you'd had your fill with torturing me.”

His eyebrow said the fuck you that hadn't bubbled out of his mouth.  
“We gotta work. You stay, you work. You wanna go, have some apple pie shit, then go. But here you're not fucking dying. I'm not looking over my God-damn shoulder for you all the time. It’ll get me killed. Or worse, get Sam killed.” He claps his hand on your shoulder as he exits, a brief squeeze that you shake off.

He turns the corner to his room, two lefts and a right from yours. He doesn't look back and you don't know why you want him too, you're so pissed. The kind of pissed that is aimed at him but really about you. He's right and you know it. You could be mad, tormented even, but you needed to put up and shut up. Nothing in this life was free and of all the things you had lost, your sense wasn’t one of them.

You train more, and by train you mean claw your way out of fights with Dean. Bruises pile up, a broken finger, twisted ankle and hurt pride. You wave off his silent offer to patch you up after, making his eyes go dark. Sessions get longer, less forgiving, more borderline sexual until the feel of Dean’s tongue on your neck or his hand where it doesn’t belong doesn’t make you freeze up anymore. There are impromptu sessions where he smears you against the hallway after coming out of the kitchen, another when he takes you by surprise in the garage. You're never relaxed, Dean's honed a fine edge on you and it only cuts when you try to sleep. More books, more booze, more late-night cigarettes that do nothing for your stamina. You practice digging holes until your hands bleed and there's an empty graveyard waiting for bodies of all the girls you'd been before. It's terrible and thankless but at least you have a reason to get up in the morning, a schedule to keep. The days the Winchesters leave on hunts stretch before you- endless and twitchy, hunting ghosts in the one place you'll never find any. 

Its May, then June and you're counting months by empty bottles and pounds lost. Sam takes you back to Target to get pants that fit. It's not as jarring this time around and the sheer normalcy of two worlds colliding disturbs you. June draws to a close and it's your boyfriend’s birthday back home, the date slaps you in the face and you wonder if he thinks you're dead. You hope he does, but it's still a knife in the heart, one you politely ignored when Dean went down on you a lifetime ago. Dean hasn't pushed, but it seems he found your answer to his post-coital question in your unending hunt to find your way home. He doesn't touch you anymore.   
Not gently anyway.

No amount of preparation, no bruises or laughs or drinking can make you forget. You asked for professionalism without asking, and that's what Dean's giving you. The job in front of you.   
You flirt, but it's a base setting on Dean, came standard with that model. It's less honest than your fighting. 

That’s the thing that makes you nervous. The thing that makes you forget, makes you drop enough of the mad to concentrate. The sweaty inches between you, the all too real danger of Dean's fists and speed. It makes some part of you sing, delicious adrenaline pumping your heart in time with his- I'm here, I’m here, I’m here.   
It makes you feel alive again. And you don’t want to feel alive. 

Boxer fractures and whiskey, that’s your fuel now, swallowed with a little Dr. Pepper to take the bitterness down. Dean lunges at you, grappling your waist as he tries to hurdle you. You snake your leg around his, tripping him up- punching the side of his knee to ensure the fall. His breath hisses out, but he makes you take the weight of him against the floor, landing like he planned it- his good knee against your lower back. Amidst the fall, he gets your left arm behind you- wrenched up just short of where it will dislocate. You feel his smugness without seeing his face. You sacrifice the arm to get your right elbow to his temple and he goes down. He’s breathing hard, punch drunk and trying to get sober. You heave him off you with your legs, left arm dangling and get your good fist up. He bites out a laugh as he sees you, slowly gaining his feet. 

Your eyes go molten at the laugh and he holds you off two hands in surrender.   
Painful tremors follow the sweat that slides down your face, the icy hot grip of it makes your stomach clench and skin go cold. You drop your fists; your knees find the concrete in mock prayer. Dean's there before you drop over, you curl away from him a little, pain remembers pain. Moments like these can't be lied to, can’t be I'm fine'd away. 

There too much eye contact as he repositions your shoulder. Its raw and aching and you don't know if it's your heart or the dislocated shoulder vying for more attention. He guides it back into place like he knows your body better than you do and in that unguarded moment there’s something naked on his face, reciprocated in yours, before both of you snap your masks back on. Your head rests on his shoulder for a moment, pent up rage sputtering out in relief. There’s a hitch in his breath-like you’re a wild animal he’s tamed. His hand ghosts around, wanting contact, but you pull free before this turns into a tide that could sweep you under. You don’t look at him as you leave the room, but there’s no cutting retort your mark you’re passing either.   
Dean almost misses it. The things you say don’t make him bleed anymore but it’s still communication. 

 

There's a hunt. It's a double whammy, ghost and in your former state. You avoid the initial discussions, surprised at how easy it is to deflect this time, and fuck up in training on purpose before Dean steps in, ruining your plans by telling you- “You're up rookie.”

Illinois is hot in September. Summer struggles to let go, the wind may be shaking the corn but it’s just blowing more hot air. Sam and Dean argue in the aisles of gas and sips, harsh murmurs over ice machines that make you feel foreign again. The double beds of the room mock you like Dean's secret smile as he watches you adjust for the millionth time on the couch. Your choice his smirk tells you as he rolls over. 

One moment of weakness nearly a year ago, you'd felt his tongue apologize in ways you didn't know you could be sorry for. You'd forgotten, for a while, what it meant. What they'd done to you and what this world had taken. Promises you'd made that didn't mean shit in the glare of being confronted with a brave new world. Churning shame and fear and hate made a terrible brew and you kept having to drink it. 

They dropped you at the graveyard, digging up something that wasn’t practice. The boys were at the house, some nice digs in the sticks, while you handled the corpse -in case the house didn't do the trick. Hours of sheer labor, all that separates you from the dead, six feet of dirt and some fire. You're striking a match when the ghost shows up and you freeze like Dean said you would. Not because you were scared, although that much was true. You were looking at your own face. The ghost paused too, the funhouse mirror of was and is. They sent you to burn your own double-mints body. The shock of that wore thin after the ghost stared hefting you around. Three trees later and you were ready to do some self-damage, tossing the entire book of matches into the pit. Marveling over the flaming grave, you notice that that plot was marked but someone had torn off the temporary name plate.   
You know who. 

The walk back is ruined by a cloud of disbelief and rage, the kind of rage that boils over internally, reshapes you like molten rock.

Dean's silent when you finally get back, studies your face- he wants to help, and you slug him in the eye, really putting your shoulder into it. Dean has to take a step back, but holds his ground, eye already swelling shut, he blocks the next punch, only the first ones free, and pins your arms studying your face. There’s a staring contest where fire and ice meet until Sam breaks it up. He’s ready with some first aid, ice already in bags, and a sympathetic face to go along with it. Dean starts to protest, but Sam stares him down and Dean slams the hotel door on his way out.

There’s blood but you don’t feel it anymore, you want to scream through Sam’s explanation, but you don’t. There’s too much cold logic in Sam, the truth is brutal but you can’t fix its repercussions like a broken bone. He puts some butterfly bandages on your eyebrow and puts your nose to rights; when he’s done you just lay down on that fucking couch, tucked into yourself like you could ball up until you disappeared. 

You start avoiding the mirror. In this case its warranted, your face is destroyed, you don't need to see it to know. The pain blooming up under searching fingers tells you a thousand bitter truths about the shape of your nose, the twilight color your face must bear. Your clothes are starting to hang on you, Dean drops the salt and you fetch it midair before you even realize it was falling. Dean can’t hide the pride in his face, Sam’s grin splits open like overripe fruit-giving Dean shit about how you were getting faster than him. Turning back the clock on your body- you kept thinking, with no little irony, that Dean was carving you into a new animal. 

Graduation had been killing yourself. The part of you that lingered in that other world, exorcised like this world’s ghost. Sam began apologies you didn't let him finish and Dean’s eyes were on you, evergreen and unapologetic- You needed this; they say. I did you a favor. You feel like more than a stand in now. It feels permanent in ways you can’t explain.   
Sam lets you have the bed, to Dean’s disproval. He follows you outside to smoke in the early hours, before Dean’s awake.   
“He’s doing what he knows. I didn’t think it was the best plan, to be fair. A little fucked up to make you ice yourself. There was, like maybe a 5% chance she’d show at the graveyard. No emf, no harm, no foul.”

“Well, he got his way, didn’t he?” 

Sam wraps a hand around your bicep; you feel the solidarity, the downright apology in his grip.  
“He just wants you to be ok, you know that right?”  
The look you give him makes him cut off a laugh that wants to spring out.

“Idiots. Both of you.” Sam takes off on his run after flicking what was left of the cigarette out of your hand.

The gulf between you shrinks and grows simultaneously. The ride home is a battering ram of insults slung, none of which have anything to do with the ghost you put down. Nor do you reference their initial welcoming ceremony. Nobody’s forgotten, but it feels like you’ve laid something to rest, burned it out in the moment you watched your own face ash up and float away.


	3. Because I'm Hungry and Hollow

The walls were up, higher than the fabled city of Jericho. Despite you trying to make peace, you couldn’t buy that with anger. Couldn’t buy it with grief either. That echo of your face haunted you, the terror in your own eyes as they burned out. You’d wake up screaming at night, sometimes you’d vomit and the acid bitter taste of it stuck with you all day. Dean had burst in the first few times, checking the perimeter like a guard, until your stare froze him out of the room. That almost extended hand withering on the vine.   
Sam never came, because he knew better, the only monsters were the ones you were bunking with. You didn’t speak to either after returning to the bunker, the silence was accusatory, but you refused to lash out. Dean goaded you in your daily training, but you refused to rise to the occasion anymore. The death of your dark mirror seemed like a door closing, locking you in this universe. After the ride home you couldn’t keep up the charade.   
Cases came and went. Virginia, Missouri, Kentucky. Vamps, vetala, revenant. Your life becomes the miles clicking by, and the endless drone of hotels rooms, rinse and repeat. There’s almost a smile when you pin the revenant to her grave, that sweaty exhilaration making your blood run clean and hot, but its locked down before it can be born. Dean hands you up, out of the grave-he looks almost proud -and you check the edges of your mask, that robot smooth expression you’ve mastered. He claps a hand on your shoulder and let’s a feral grin break his face wide open. You leave the hand there but don’t react to it, something you can wholly ignore. Dean sees, squeezes almost to the point of pain. He wants to crack that mask, but he doesn’t think pain can do it anymore. Just a song you’ve heard before. He lets it drop on his own, missing the time where you’d have bitten his fucking head off for it.   
“Fuckin stubborn,” Dean almost whispers it. Sam hears and looks at him, that silent communication couriering- sounds like someone else I know.  
It’s Colorado this time- man, you fucking hate camping. Plus, it’s your least favorite monster (now that you have to fucking hunt it, it scares the shit out of you)- a wendigo. You’re in boots that make you slow- terrain and all. You miss your tennies already. Sam insisted you switch- for the hike, and yeah, your feet are dry, but you’ve given up speed for bulky comfort. People had been disappearing from trails around Devils Gulch Road- a difficult trail, especially with most people not logging a flight plan. It’s getting notice, but the polite reminders that these trails aren’t for beginners have gotten a little too frequent.  
It’s a steep and miserable 8 miles, your calves are burning, and the weight of Dean’s gaze keeps you on edge. The world goes clumsy and Dean overcorrects you, feet scrambling loose rocks down the ridgeline. When you fling his arm back at him, he backs you into the tree roots on the high bank, the long line of his body pressed up hard enough against yours to know he’s interested.   
“You wanna pretend? Fine. But don’t spite me so hard, you get yourself killed,” he gruffs out at you, his breath fogging out in warning. He stays pressed against you for a moment, proving that he can, before he backs off and shoves you ahead. You can feel Sam watching but he doesn’t say anything, the long weeks of silence hasn’t won him over.   
The mountains spear into the sky as you go off trail, seeking out the rocky expanse that’s riddled with caves and other hiding spaces. The trees here are so thick that you feel like you’ve gone back in time, some primordial forest where fire was the last stand against the dark. There’s a bite to the air, so crisp- its cutting now that the suns going down. Sam drops his pack without a word and each brother instinctively knows what tasks need done to set up camp. You wander off to look for firewood because you don’t know what else to do and you’ll be damned if you ask. By the time you get back there’s already a neat pile of wood, and Dean’s roasting something over the fire that twists Sam’s face into a grimace.   
“At least its not lizard,” you attempt a joke that hangs out in the breeze, no one laughing.  
Sam may not laugh but the warming crinkles around his eyes come back. It’s been so long since you’ve seen them directed at you. He holds out a health bar, granola something, but you shake your head-no, and turn to Dean. He gives you a nod and starts cutting you a portion. A fragile truce is born over the fire, like you’re back in the Impala after that disastrous first hunt. Something loosens in your chest, and you decide not to disassemble, not now. You’re making the best of it. Dean leans over and you see the tip of a bandage peeking out, the vee of his shirt exposing it before he pulls it up. There’s been a lot of Dean solo time lately so you’re curious. Not interested, curious.   
The night’s uncomfortable; you can barely sleep in a bed, much less on the ground- unprotected. The three of you take shifts keeping watch, but Dean gives it up when he realizes you won’t sleep. You gave up the pretend version a few hours ago, laying there with your eyes closed like you could summon up peace. Like your brain would shut off.   
Currently, your hands were weaving sticks together for torches, the repetitive motions oddly calming. That green smell of sap was making the air sharp, it reminded too much of Dean- that wild smell that crept off him when you got too close. That restless anxiety was closing up your throat again, skittering too close to Dean- sticks, you need more fuckin sticks. Dean cracks an eye open at your departure before the stiff lines of his arm relax back into sleep.   
You don’t make it far. There’s a supernova of pain exploding through your vision- Lights out.   
When you wake up, everything’s sideways. There’s a warm bulk behind you and bars of light streaming through the blinds, forcibly cheerful. The bed doesn’t smell like regret and you feel a slight tenderness in your head- but no gaping pain. You slide up, knowing its Dean before you see him curled into sleep, arm still out like he’s reaching for you. Its too domestic and its makes you queasy enough to seek the bathroom.   
Whatever happened, there a perfect drizzle of flaky dried blood on your hairline. Studying the mirror like it has answers-You don’t look like someone who’s been taking an involuntary nap. The bathroom sink doesn’t have some sort of growth, and the shower is so white its blinding. It bothers you. Like an itch you can’t scratch. It seems weird-dreamlike. But, so do concussions.   
How’d they hoof you out of the woods?  
You peer through the slats of the blinds, and dust doesn’t coat your fingers. Sam’s getting out of the Impala- jugging coffee and a bag that promises to be donuts. You hear Dean stir, how the hell did you waking up not turn on commando mode? Your head’s hurting now, delayed-remembering that it should hurt instead of an automatic response.   
Sam hands you a coffee, and you grab a donut before throwing on some shorts to smoke. You’ve got a bone to pick with whoever de-pants you, but that’s a conversation for after coffee. Dean’s on your ass as you walk out; you sit on a parking block to take the lashing you know is coming.   
He offers you a hand that you ignore, shoveling more donut into your mouth and almost choking when it looks like he’s going to cry. The term glistening comes to mind, but it’s so buried in the porn vocabulary in your head that you can’t string it into a proper sentence. When he comes down to your level you do choke, thumping your chest like an asshole.   
“I could’ve lost you,” his head is bowed when he scratches it out. You hacking out a partially masticated donut should ruin the moment, but somehow, it doesn’t. His hand cups your jawline and you look at him like he’s lost his freaking mind. There’s too much there, that earnest expression with those fucking tears waiting for a cue.   
“Ok, I’m calling bullshit here.” You spin away, knocking over your coffee. You swipe his and he allows it. There’s no whiskey in it. You push him off, spinning in the dirt and get to your feet.   
“Who the fuck are you,” you spit -arms coming up defensively.   
“Man, you hit your head pretty hard, huh?” He’s all easy smiles and concern. You notice his bare arms for the first time, those winding tattoos you’d never admit that you love-they’re missing. All that smooth unbroken skin, even the scar by his lip is gone. You look down and realize that your right arm is smooth as glass; no reminders of heat left to waffle iron your skin. No tattoos, no scars, just perfect blemish free skin -like hunting and life hadn’t made its mark on you or Dean. Hadn’t carved something out in return.   
“Am I fucking dead?” Your voice is shaking, but your hands are still curled into fists.   
Dean, concern bleeding out of him instead of sarcasm, goes to surround you again- hug, that’s a hug coming. You swing wildly to back him off. Sam’s not far behind and they’re both so… accommodating. Gentle. It fucks your brain up and makes it drum harder against your skull.   
Did you wake up in a new universe? Again? Head hanging in your hands, shocked deep breaths razor out of you. The whirl of thought, trying to piece together what happened last night-but there’s a terrifying blank where memory should be. Sam and Dean hold your shoulders like pillars, but its unfamiliar- too familiar in fact.   
Dean’s eyeing you with concern, he squeezes your shoulder in solidarity, “You’re gonna be alright.” Sam nods his head empathically with too much eye contact.   
That’s a fake promise if you’ve ever heard one and as much as you aren’t on the greatest of terms with your Dean, you know he doesn’t do that. He’s raw and he pisses you off, but he doesn’t make a promise he can’t keep. He doesn’t deal in platitudes. You’ve lost that man, the one you couldn’t bring yourself to have. He’s gone, and it rips something out of you, claws up your insides worse than losing home. Your palm is bleeding now, fingernails pressed too tight- holding it together.   
This too clean, kind version is mocking you without even knowing it. Your outsides don’t match your insides anymore, you miss the scars you cursed, the hollowness under your eyes. You’d earned them, they were the truth. Losing them was like losing your past, set adrift in a strange sea. Your checks are wet, are you fucking crying, you thought a heart that was broken couldn’t break.   
You shove Dean off you, swatting the remnants of weakness from your face. Storming into the motel room, you tear through your bag and nothing looks familiar. These clothes are too, nice. You change anyway, J. Crew hunter is better than naked. You scrub the blood from your forehead and fuck me, you don’t even need makeup. Dean’s pounding before you finish, the worry evident in the staccato pattern he’s wearing into the door. You blow by him and jab a finger at the nearest chair until he sits.   
“What the hell is going on here?”  
Dean’s up before you know it, trying to reassure with his hands instead of his words. At least that parts the same. “Calm down, were gonna figure out whatever’s got you spooked, babe.”  
“Babe?” Sarcasm drips from the word.   
Dean’s face screws into a hurt replica of the fuck you look you’re used to. Sam is getting alarmed now, all eyebrows and placating outstretched arms, “We’re your friends, tell us what’s going on.”  
“You aren’t the guys I went into Estes Park with,” you spit accusingly.   
“What do you mean?” Sam asks his tone getting softer, “I’m Sam, you know me, we’re friends. That’s Dean, your boyfriend or whatever you guys are not calling each other lately. Who did you think we were?”   
“I know who you look like, but you aren’t Sam and Dean. I mean, maybe you’re the pretty TV versions, but I’ve met the real thing and shit isn’t this pretty.”  
“Sweetheart, you hit your head pretty hard in the woods, you probably have a concussion. It’s perfectly normal to have things seem weird after that. Let’s not do anything rash, ok?” Dean’s got that sweaty nervous look and it makes your eye tick. He has his hands on your hips before you know it, and you punch him in the mouth reflexively. The sound he makes is animal and the closest thing you’ve heard to real Dean so far.   
“Back off Abercrombie.”  
“Ok, everybody keep their distance,” Sam’s the voice of reason and sits Dean down as he gestures for you to do the same. He checks his brother before he addresses you, “You don’t belong here, do you? You’d never hurt Dean.”  
“I’m not a monster, I just…this isn’t the right universe. I don’t even know how I got here. What happened after I got knocked out at camp? Are we still in fucking Colorado?”  
“Standard wendigo. Took you back to his nest and tried to make human carpaccio out of you. We lit him up and bravo- heroes. Carried you back down the mountain, worried and sore, waiting for you to wake up. And now this,” Dean’s speech tried to stay in the fact zone before trailing off into emotion city, the slight waver betraying his concern. As soft as they seemed, they still cut off access to the door. Not all instincts gone then, just buried deeper.   
The day wears on, there too many looks in that rear view mirror that say too much. This less guarded version of Dean- rough edges smoothed out, is unsettling. When you stop for gas, you have to get cigarettes out of one of those machines you haven’t seen in ten years, pull knob and all. Its hidden in the back like some shameful secret and you marvel over the 70’s gold tone of it. It looks exactly like the one in a bar where you grew up. You make it halfway through one before Dean swats it out of your mouth. The ensuing fight is mostly one sided, but Dean’s left disappointed and bleeding. The bunker isn’t any better, it’s cleaner than it should be, and it doesn’t smell like old men and abandonment.  
There’s so much pining going on you could sell little tree shaped souvenirs. Its everything you thought you’d always wanted- and its driving you insane. This sensitive man, an open book really, makes your lip curl. Feelings aren’t given, they’re carved out-earned with pain, traded in silence. Never in words, like words could ever be enough.   
The words that are inside you would make this man shudder, they would make him worry and quake. He’d be afraid. Or disgusted. You miss the Dean that could look at you and see you, not this imposter that saw what he wanted instead of what you are. You feel him sometimes, your Dean. You think of him as yours, just to differentiate. You hear his commentary running through your head. It’s what you imagine he’d say, you never thought you’d miss his sardonic twist on things. There are times when you’re half asleep that you almost think you see him, standing over your bed, his scarred lip twitching. You almost pass him a cigarette when you sneak out in the middle of the night to get your fix.   
You barely tolerate the touching that these brothers seem so fond of doing, jerking like a startled animal any time it happens. Dean’s always trying to calm you, and sometimes it works, humor was a bridge he’d spanned before. You allow more leeway for him; this soft version can’t hurt you anymore than he could Sam. He touches you; eventually you accept it, those fingers covet things and you need their help you get back. The three of you dig into universe hopping, but there’s no corpse at the end to burn. It should never have happened at all, much less by accident. You start looking into darker ways, older books. At this point you don’t even know where you want to go anymore.   
You entertain the idea of staying. Giving up the ghost. This Dean isn’t all that bad, closer than he thinks- the sparrows are flying, ready to whisk him off into his darker half. Each hunt, each time you aren’t who he wants you to be- Dean comes back a little more indigo, water coloring the rooms of his soul. You encourage it, how do you miss something you never had, before you realize what you’re doing- training him like a bonsai tree tied down by wire. The same thing your Dean was trying to do to you. Not that you’re better than that, you just wonder if you’ll stay. It’s a dream, this man who makes you grilled cheese sandwiches and can be sweet un-ironically. Naïve to wear his heart so readily on his sleeve, a billboard for having it broken or worse.   
These errant fond thoughts piss off the Dean Voice you have riding around in your skull. The scoffs when you feel a secret thrill of delight- at a fuckin cheese sandwich- it says. Takes so little to impress you anymore.   
Yeah, well I’m still a girl.  
Haven’t forgotten. Come back and I’ll show you what I remember.   
You feel a twinge of regret when you find the spell.   
Kill the thing you love most in this world. Make like Dorothy and click your heels together to leap- the Dean Voice says. There are some blood sigils in there, nothing too complicated. You rip the pages from the book (one that’s in the no-friggin-way section as described by Sam), and you tuck it into a brick you’ve chiseled out of the wall. They never even search your room. Not to mention the zero amount of torture. One silver knife, a papercut later, and they broke out the welcome wagon.   
This fucks you up inside, a cancer. The calendar keeps spinning days and the Dean Voice starts getting impatient. The acid in your stomach makes no room for food; cigarettes and whiskey hold your hand like new Dean wants to. He keeps hanging it out there, bringing you snacks you don’t eat. These curses of small kindnesses don’t make it any easier. You cry when you’re alone and you thought your crying was done.   
This isn’t even real!  
Oh, and the measuring stick for that is waking up in Supernatural Land 2.0?  
Even so, Sam’ll bring him back! You’re making a big deal out of nothing.  
So straight murdering a dude, like marriage material you, is nothing? Couldn’t kill you you and you’re a dick.   
I ain’t him.   
Jesus fuck, do I know that.  
You gotta choose.   
You count your sins on your fingers, wondering which one pushed you through the fiery gates you know are looming only a lifetime away; you’d hurt people, can’t lie to yourself about that. But they’d always deserved it. Beating up your stalking ex with a bat didn’t make you lose sleep at night. Nor did burning that building full of drug dealers down. All that had been before and the things since you jumped universes, well, that lived in a similar justified area of your brain.   
When you do sleep at night, you dream of your Dean. You don’t want to, you could be ok here, adopt a new cleaner life, and live out some apple pie shit with new Dean. Everything you want without the demanding edge, that knife edge of pleasure and pain. It could be easy, simple even.   
The Dean voice in your head screams at you then- None of this is real. It’s just something you’ve never had. It’s weak, and it’s a fucking lie. That voice never gives you any peace, it rips open all the excuses you make, mocks the things you think you can give up to keep it. It’s the voice that finally wins- you wonder if you’ve gone a little mad, listening to what you think Dean might say. Rationalizing the horrific.   
There’s a certain relief to making the decision. Not that it’s a good one and it doesn’t rip your fucking heart out, but you’ve decided. You waste (in the Dean voice’s opinion) time digging up a resurrection cure, try it on a few things to make sure it doesn’t go all pet cemetery. You might have to slit his throat, but that doesn’t mean he has to stay dead. You go to that cold place inside yourself, dig out that person you call on to get shit done.   
There’s not a good way to do this. Dean may be the minor leagues- compared to yours, but he’s not helpless. He could still do some real, lasting damage and you really don’t want this to be traumatic. Well, more traumatic than it needs to be. A few dozen plans are weighed and discarded before you keep dancing around one. The Dean Voice hates it. But he agrees the logic is sound.   
Just get it over with.   
Hey, this is fucking bad, even for me.   
This is what he wants, trust me.  
Yeah but I think he expects a happy ending instead of a dead one.   
Better than most of the ways I thought I’d go out. 

You let your internal monologue lapse; this wasn’t helping. Time to commit.  
A few dozen drinks later and you and Dean are laughing. God, you can’t remember the last time you’d laughed like that, maybe knowing it was all going to end made it possible. His hands are there at your shoulder, lingering at your collarbone. He’s down to a t-shirt now and you want to run, put this off a little longer. You don’t want to kill him, and you want him on you even less. There’s a vulnerability you’ll have to give up, show your soft underbelly. This Dean won’t have it any other way. There’s still too much fucking talking, he wants to know you, wants to paint you with a beautiful victim brush, and you let him.   
He comes to his own conclusions about you anyway. Its grating, letting someone in like this, someone who wants to love you. Not the way you need, the way he needs. He fills in your blanks with stories he can handle. Wants to save you.  
But you’ve always saved yourself.   
He lets you on top, you try not to be too demanding, and when it reaches that verge, he pulls back, there’s a small frown that forms at the corner of his mouth. You’d lured him into your room, letting him think it was his idea, but you’ve got your knife there, ready to go. The sex is, nice, you suppose. His dick nudging its way inside you isn’t altogether unpleasant. The size and shape alone are worth it, without crossing over into kidney pain territory. The Dean Voice you’d conjured up is thankfully silent, but you almost have a feverish vision of him watching you, his breath on your shoulder. You try to focus on your body, try to get into that zone you’ve visited before, that you but not you shell that lets you go through the motions of sex. There’s not enough friction, not enough throbbing need for this to gut you. Dean’s enjoying it either way, and really, this is for him. At the moment he goes blind; you put the knife to his throat. He’s faster than you thought, trying to twist it out of your grip. He gets a blow in on the soft part of your ribs, but you hold it together, all those punishing sessions with Dean trained you to ignore pain. He’s still inside you when he flips you to your back, it sends a keen thrill through you that you barely recognize.  
“Why?” The ask isn’t soft, it’s heartrending. Even with him on top, you’re already there, one twitch and its over. “I would’ve loved you… I do love you.” His hand molds the side of your face, still worshipful. Regret creeps into both your eyes. His turn hard before giving his harsh conclusion, “He can’t you know, this guy you’re dying to get back to. He doesn’t have it in him.” You may hold the knife but Dean’s the one twisting it.   
“It doesn’t matter,” you kiss him a little and he bites back enough to draw blood, “whatever part of me is left, he owns. I’d burn down the whole fucking world for him.”  
You slide the knife into his throat and taste his death. Its bitter, that coppery whisper as his eyes fade back would haunt you all your days.   
Your Dean is there now, more concrete than you’ve ever seen him. He drags a hand under your eyes, and you realize you’re crying. A silent chest quaking cry, cutting out from your heart. The Dean under you fades in and out, a magician’s smoke trick.  
Suddenly Sam’s there- a glitch in the Matrix. All the motion in between is lost. He’s cradling what’s left of his brother, “Tell me again you aren’t a monster!” he screams, the words ripped out of him. Another shift- you’re not naked anymore. The room starts to go grey along the edges, details bleeding together.   
“Relax, neither of you stay dead for long,” you say it to no one, the rooms already empty. Sam and Dean have vanished. There’s just your Dean and you wonder if you’ve gone mad. He’s white knuckling his own fists before he pops out too.   
Jarringly, you’re back in the woods, the fire dying next to you as you wake up. Sam’s watching, under lit by the flames, and looks devilish compared to the counterpart you’d gotten used to. “Djinn,” he remarks to you in explanation.   
Dean’s up too, lying too close to you considering you’d just felt what he was packing under those jeans. You avoid that gaze and ask, “Dreamroot?”  
“You already die in your dreams; suicide wasn’t going to work for you.” You’re half turned already- so when he speaks- it’s almost directly into your ear. You stop wondering how he knows these things about you.   
“Well, thanks for all the help, Winchester.”  
“Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt,” Dean drawls.


	4. The Killing Fields- Part One

There was a river of green, capped with the gold of new wheat ushering us across the interstate. It was a scene meant for sunshine, but the sky was casting pallor over the fullness of summer and even the sharp green of new plants seemed dull.   
Dean watches it pass the Impala, that hot green smell of plants withering sharpening the air, but it fails to cheer him up like usual. He watches you lean over toward Sam and squashes something like jealousy slithering in his belly. That’s all he does anymore, watches you. Not when you’re looking of course, he can freeze you out too. It’s too fucking hot in Texas and it’s getting under his skin.   
Dean is sick of pretending that he doesn’t know the cadence of your voice even in his sleep pretending that he couldn’t map out every inch of your skin-tracing scars, he wants to touch you in a non-essential way, something that isn’t utilitarian, something soft that has nothing to do with pity, something hard that has nothing to do with pain. You shrug him off, snarl at his overtures, and freeze out any fire he manages to stir up. The training (shitty fights) keep going; he can’t toe that edge he keeps trying to push you over if he can’t find it. That dance of fists and fury, that’s where you’re honest, that’s where you’re you. The bullshit and the overthinking go away. He’s just got to get through those fucking walls you’ve built, but fighting doesn’t seem to be getting him there. There’s lots of other ways to push and he’s stabbing around in the dark trying to find one that will work.   
Everybody breaks. You included.   
Moments where he wants to let himself go come up more than road signs, teasing him to unchain that monster and just take. Purgatory, hell, and all manner of nasty in between had left him with the urge, then the hot slice of almost guilt afterwards just for thinking it. He could look at that ugly side without flinching anymore, could own the parts of himself that were malevolent. Control was the line that Dean towed, it’s what separates him from the straight evil motherfuckers. A thin line maybe, but its carved so deep it rides under even the angel warding on his ribs. Goes deeper than the marrow.   
You’re carved in him too, makes him wonder if Alastair sliced your name into his skin instead of careful strokes, cursive ribboning through muscle and bone. The taste of you is in his mouth now, and nothing is washing it out. Not the waitress in Illinois, not the extremely grateful Vic from Iowa. The girls blend together, they’re all you in the end anyway. He dreams it different than he knows it is, sometimes it’s soft and full of lies like everyone else. Imagining your mouth around his dick instead of the waitresses (Leah?) had almost made him tender. But Dean knows what he is, there’s no soft courting for you. He sees his counterpoint, accepts what is, and reshapes what he can around it to suit him, you included.   
He’s not sure what to call it, not that he could define any sort of love in a typical fashion. Not that this is fucking love. He wants you there, admits to himself -he’d go back into even hell to find you. Wants you wrapped around his dick, wants to see your face in the rearview mirror in the backseat of the car, wants to hear your savage jokes in a voice roughened by a lifetime of cigarettes and whiskey. The strings with you, he felt them snick into place one at a time- got mad about it, then rolled with the punches, trying to ensure you’d survive the ramifications of that. Couldn’t be linked to him without being some hard-unbreakable thing. And after as lifetime of easing chicks into the- We got tonight. Who needs tomorrow- routine, he’s fucking all thumbs when it comes to whatever the hell this is.   
You look at him, the kind of looks that speak volumes with words that you never say. He knows there’s something between you, but you bury it like the dead and move on. It makes him grit his teeth and laugh again, like that first time, remembering John telling him Mary drove him crazy, crazy enough to want to throttle her and that’s when he’d known he was a goner. Boy, he’d say, when the woman gets your back up along with your dick, she’s it.   
He considers all the normal things, and realizes flowers and shit are just another mask he can wear, and the whole point of you is- he doesn’t have to. You’re not Lisa, that song and dance of eggs in the morning and apologies like drops of sugar that dissolve under the slightest pressure. You’re lying to yourself; Dean can see it, did see it in your head. You think about his tongue, that much he knows; catches you staring at it when it flicks out, both remembering. Sam keeps telling him to be patient, drabbles on about timing and trauma, but Dean knows you, knows what makes you tick. Too much time means you can build higher walls. Just like him. Too much god damn pride.   
It’d be amusing if he hadn’t had a fucking concrete dick for a year. Thought fucking other girls would break you, coming home smelling like booze and snatch would make you flip shit. But you didn’t. Just kept up with those cool looks, eyebrows over coffee. Some stone saint he couldn’t touch. Fuckin infuriating.   
What he saw in your head in Colorado filled him with a cold rage. That fucking pussy version of him had gotten into yours. And yeah, he’d gone wandering a bit in your headspace, but fuck it, he’d earned that after the denial path you were clearly on. His hands tightened on the steering wheel, knuckles whitening until Sam gave him a pointed look.   
\- 

Sam’s researching this one hard, he’s got such a boner for serial killers, you think to yourself. It cracks a smile wide over your face that Dean meets in the rearview mirror. “What’re you looking at Winchester,” its snide as hell and you look away even though you know he basically just read your mind.   
The dreams didn’t stop after you’d left the Pleasantville universe. Dean was with you every night and Christ; you’d kill for some blackout sleep. Keeping that mask on, keeping the truth buried deeper that anything on Oak Island, it was wearing you down. You can feel his frowning stare scald the side of your face; dude had fucking laser vision.   
The Impala catches gravel as Dean pulls off the interstate, you climb out Sam’s side even though Dean leaves the door open. Skin frying red in the bake of central Texas, Sam finally corners you on the picnic table, deliberately eyeing the fact that you were sitting on the top instead of the seat. You offered him a smile that held none of the warmth of the day and stayed where you were. The smoke curling off your cigarette was enough to keep him at a distance.   
“So…I’m just giving you a heads up here, cause I don’t want the hard hello my brother got last time…”   
Now he had your attention, he continued-“Vics range a little, but most are mid height, brown hair, blue eyes.” He points at you as he says it.   
“Good taste.”   
“You have no idea,” Dean snags your cigarette, the ashy tip flaring out once more before Dean flicks it off.   
“That was the last drag asshole.”   
“You want it back?” he edges it out, holding most of the smoke in. Your face screws up in a grimace and Dean’s there before you know it, his palms slide up your thighs, scratching against the denim. Sam chuffs out a laugh when you squeak out, “What t-“ You can only mouth the word fuck you were about to say and it definitely doesn’t help the situation.   
Dean takes advantage of your open mouth to exhale the smoke, pushing it down your throat. His lips are whispering against yours, a funny moment turned intimate, cool smoke coiling down until you push him off. You can’t give him anything that he can keep.   
“Fuck off,” the words come out smoky and you shimmy off the table onto colt legs and try to pull off dignified. You head to the bathroom, knowing that’s a place Dean won’t go. Well, in theory anyway. There really isn’t any place Dean won’t go, if you give him a reason. Proving your theory, he’s waiting for you outside when you finish, and you roll your eyes so far it almost throws off your walk.   
“Not alone, not here,” he grabs the thick part of your bicep like you were a child to be led. “We’re too close to them now.”   
“So, I have a bathroom buddy? This hunts gonna be real long if you don’t ease up.”   
He doesn’t look at you. The sheer absence of it is a glaring sign. Looks through you, looks at your hair or shoe or hand. Professional. Everything you asked for. It’s driving you fucking crazy because it’s working. Other than that little exchange on the picnic table, Dean was giving you a taste of your own medicine.   
The road stripes of I-45 were rhythmically shooting under the Impala when you spotted it, the first thing- since seeing your undead face- that spooked you. A sign dangling off the side of a bridge you were about to pass under-‘You are now entering the cruel world’, scribed in red slanted handwriting.   
“Looks like the Welcome wagon’s out,” Sam said, eyeing the peeling paint of the bridge already growing smaller in the distance.   
When you finally pull off, its some nowhere town, oil pumps long run dry and the scorching heat baking down. You stare at the rusted hammerhead, seen one field, seen them all.   
“The Texas Killing fields, man,” Sam begins, voice in awe.   
“Ain’t exactly the field of dreams here, Sam,” you taunt at him, ready sneer on your face that he answers with iceberg chill, “It’s a field of someone’s dreams.”   
“Yeah, a serial killer’s. Don’t go getting a boner over it Sam,” Dean jested.   
EMF’s spotty, but a bust. So are the about 3 other weird things they try. Plus, you weren’t exactly sure how many graves were here, and you couldn’t salt and burn them all. Consensus was saying monster. The dead girls eating bullets were confusing things, but the streak had gone on too long for a serial killer. Pictures of corpses were spread at your feet, a memento mori flashing against the brown carpet.   
“The rape bits throwing me off.” Dean announces, looking to Sam.   
Your mind starts to wander, back to the woods of last week, the air getting crisp in Colorado. The uneven rhythm of Dean’s shoulder bumping against yours, the hesitant drunken steps that come from blood loss. The sawing of his breath against the side of your face, curses exhaled like prayers, trying to keep you moving. You don’t remember the car- the slide of the backseat or the vicious turns that Dean must have drove. You don’t remember that boneless walk with you draped in his arms. You do remember that steady glow of light, lamp burning behind him, firing crimson up the trail of blood strung between you. You wonder how much of his blood beats in your heart, keeping you alive. The faint outline of medical tape where they’d removed the IV still hadn’t washed off. You pick at it like it could get rid of obligation. You still look like a victim, Dean’s seven-day rule or not. Massive blood loss, significant limb damage, or head injury= benched for an entire week. You were itching to kill something, wanted to scrape off the feeling of helplessness when it was still new, before it had time to grow roots. Enough cruel things grew in that rocky soil.   
Snagging a beer from the cooler sitting sidecar to Dean, you head outside to smoke, already hearing his footsteps dogging you. This part hadn’t changed at least; nicotine was never a lonely friend. Watching the end of his flare up in the dark, barely illuminating the planes of his face, nothing breaking the silence of the moment except for that quiet ahhh of the first inhale, the harsh mint drag of it, pleasure-laced poison.   
“How long are we gonna do this?” Dean exhales it, smoke framing each word.   
“Do what.”   
“Pretend that I didn’t see you on my dick in the Matrix. Pretend like we don’t both want it to happen again.”   
“D’ya know how fucking invasive that is?”   
“Like I couldn’t fucking smell it on you,” he backs you into the brick of the motel wall, scraping you up the side of it until you’re wound around him, until he’s flush against you, pressing into the parts that ache, “The longer you pick this apart, the more I think you aren’t the person I thought you were. More time I have to remember why it’s a bad fucking idea in the first place.” He drops you roughly to your feet, barely keeping upright and it’s so fucking cold without him there.   
“It’s because it is a bad fucking idea.”   
“We both know those are the best kind.” He smiles at you like he has a sinister secret, and you wonder, not for the first time, if Dean’s infiltrating your dreams for real. Riding dreamroot into your skull to fuck the yes into you. You had been missing a god damn handful of hair when you’d woken up, so it wasn’t outside the realm of possible. Made you feel cornered, petty, pushing back at every opportunity.   
“I thought this could be the thing we never fucking talked about. It’s not like I’m pushing you for all that other shit,” you gesture in a loop, a mock halo. Oh, that clams him up. That restlessness starts oozing out of him, pacing a tattoo into the pavement.  
“The things you gutted to get back here? Better left in a grave.”   
“Not all of them.” You flick your cigarette off before its time, already turning away.   
He’s on you before you get more than two steps, but that harsh whisper at your ear makes you shiver in more ways than one, “We only love the dead. Shit that can’t hurt us anymore. If that’s what you wanted, you should’ve stayed gone. “   
“Why the fuck didn’t you let me?” You shove off his grip, head back inside. Maybe you should get gone. Other places, other lore. Your spin in the bunker certainly hadn’t gotten you any closer to home. You can feel Dean fuming at your back, that solid press of him against the dark taking up too much real estate. You wonder if the sheer gravity of him kept you here.   
Dean goes out that night and doesn’t come back. It takes all your effort to ignore it, can’t claim a dude without claiming a dude. He can fuck his way through the entire Lone Star state if he wants. But then again, so can you. The thought immediately cheers you, that’s what you need, take the fucking edge off. Dean’s fraying your resolve along the edges -because, I mean- fuck, it had been a while. Fucking some rando didn’t mean anything. Not like Dean.   
It was totally fucked logic, but logic wasn’t getting you home either. Besides, it’s not like you were gonna see the dude again. It’d be like it never happened.   
The problem is, this is a shit-hole town, not unlike the one you grew up in. Therefore- one bar. The place is fucking packed, which is helpful, but you don’t pretend that Dean won’t notice. The Impala looks occupied, there’s no convenient handprint on the window or anything, just a feeling. Good- Dean’s off the field.   
A few shooters of whiskey later and you’re ready to fake it. The bartender is a kindly looking fellow of about sixty-five and he’s giving you these sorrowful judgy looks- the more you drink the worse they get and its getting your back up. You look too-you, to pull off the wide-eyed innocent part very well, but confident bitch-adjacent, well- that’s your specialty. Harder to sell in Texas apparently, but you’ve got some window shoppers. You’re letting some dude ‘teach’ you pool when Dean re-enters. Getting his rocks off slowed his game because he doesn’t notice you right away. Then again, you are in a freaking dress. Neither the dress nor the abandoned outrage over this tool teaching you a game that you’d wipe the floor with him otherwise is stopping you from accomplishing your goal for the night-fucking Dean out of your system. Fucking this up before it becomes the thing that fucks you up.   
You drag Chris(fuck- you hope that’s his name) out of the bar before you show up on Dean’s radar. You’re not even sure he would care, but at this point you’re running on adrenaline and the drive to just get it done. It looks like a home run before Chris gets prissy about fucking in an alley. He keeps pointing at his truck like it’s going to sprout a king-sized bed with an attached spa. No fuckin way were you getting in that god damn truck. You drop the clueless mask, face going hard, “We fuck here or we don’t fuck. There are plenty of other dudes in there.”   
He flinches at the change in tone, the new aggressive slant to your body. Studying you for a minute, you’re not sure you like the spark that flares up in his eyes, but you’ve gone this far already. His fingers are in your too dry pussy before you can whistle up enthusiasm. Dude could trim his fingernails, that’s for sure. The thought makes you saw out a stillborn laugh, deciding that this was over before it really began. The guy would have to do at least a halfway decent job for you to even pretend to forget about Dean, and he wasn’t even batting for the minors here. You put a hand on Chris’s arm, trying to wrench him out of you-when he pushes back. There’s a sneer on his face now and it deflates a little when your face doesn’t flit to panic.   
Before you can rearrange this dude’s face, Dean’s there to do it for you. Chris’s fingers are still curled- still trying to Morse code his way out of your vagina. Once the initial fuck you part of the fight is over, Dean’s still handing out ass kicking like there’s a fire sale. You go to pull him off and he fucking snarls at you. Stupidly you realize this isn’t about the rapey slant this clandestine adventure had taken, it’s about the fact it was happening at all. Dean’s lost in it, those fists are pounding a beat into shitbrains head, and he’s playing that song till it’s over.   
There’s a flicker of movement at the mouth of the alley- there’s a girl there. Well, she used to be a girl. Long tendrils of muddy hair wrapped around what was left of her head, crowned by marsh weeds and blood like some pagan queen. She sputtered out before you realized it was a warning. The bartender emerges from a side door and whips Dean off douche-canoe so fast- alarm bells are ringing in your head. Knife out before your brain catches up, you slash him on the arm he tries to grab you with. Redecorating his limbs with red, you notice the burn of the silver against his skin. He’s worked you into the corner where Dean had been giving out free samples of whoop ass, and before you know it there’s a steel band of a forearm snaked across your throat. Despite the elbows you’re throwing, the arm holds fast.   
The viscous dark of unconsciousness swallows you.


	5. The Killing Fields- Part Two

There’s noise first, the wet drag of too long grass, the squelch of mud under feet. Wind’s hollow bellows, insects crawling and chiming an almost clock like rhythm. Your ass is wet- that loamy marsh smell tells you where you ended up before you even open your eyes. When you try- one won’t open. You can’t tell if its permanent damage or maybe blood has welded it shut. It’s iron penny smell is in the air, ripe along with the flash of pain along your brow. No way to ascertain what’s been done to it, or how bad it is. There’s a new nauseous panic to that- fresh trails of cold sweat snaking its way across your body. Your fucking eye is on top of the pile of shit you don’t want to lose.   
There should be a punch card for this- Ring the bell five times and get a free monster pass.   
Thanks to the overeager choke hold that fucking bartender gave you, everything’s slower- like a wet rag has been pulled over your senses. It’s dark but there’s a miserly ring of sickly yellow light- a small lantern, but the real illumination comes when the heat lightning licks across the sky. It’s a dry strike, close enough for that over exposed flare like God taking a picture, but it’s not preempting cooling rain.  
If God is in the rain, you’re shit out of luck for a while. Not that God’s ever been much help in this life.   
With your depth perception fucked, it takes you longer to discern that Dean is tied up right across from you, just out of reach. There’s a woman leaning in front of him and synapses start firing, the sight of her flips your brain but it hasn’t let you in on why yet. The ropes crisscrossing Dean’s torso are thick, almost ship worthy, and he’s bound so tight you can see the flesh roll up around them. 

Back at the Motel  
Sam’s still digging- forensic files obtained via hacking or the B&E he’d pulled off earlier tonight- while you and Dean were pretending to work instead of eye fucking each other. The suit-clad dog and pony show won’t work for this- the case is too high profile, stretches back too far for it to be believable that the Feds are somehow interested again. He takes a break, chugging water and looking over towards the bar at the end of the street. He can barely make out the outline of the Impala, eyes latching onto it like a touchstone. He toys with the idea of getting a drink, decides he’s had enough of you both for now. Maybe later.   
He misses your take on things. You see people so well-when you want to. Dean too, it’s like the both of you had masterclass in reading people- except for each other. All Girl, Interrupted since you’d come back from the Djinn attack. It was uncomfortable seeing under that curtain- Dean played everything so close to the chest. Dean- basically a bad country song about lovin and leavin, proprietary over whose blood could go in your veins. The snappy hunting machine you’d all honed, that was as far from Sam as the boy he’d left behind at Stanford.   
If Sam had a word for Dean, it would be lighthouse- something craggy and worn that would stand another 100 years guiding the way to safety. Unsinkable, unflappable. But seeing Dean’s grim countenance, that hell lit ride back to the bunker, the way he’d sat for hours with a puppet string of blood- tethering you as much as his unblinking stare- looking at you the way he never dared when you were awake. Bleeding hope and warmth along with the O-negative he was giving you. That despair he hid so well-Sam knew now how Dean had looked when he had died. Imagined Dean holding him up after he was long gone in Cold Oak.   
He looks at pictures of girls long gone, sees what’s left of their final moments- painted in terror and blood and sex, thinks about the cage for a split second before he locks that down. At least for them- it’s over. His fist curls, that anger’s controlled but thinly so, he allows himself to indulge in a few wayward thoughts of what he’d do to this monster- carve the victims’ names into their bone like a prayer wheel. Take that hard justice for others he could never quite have for himself. He may not be practicing law like he’d once dreamed of, but he’d found a way to balance the scales anyway.   
Sam tries for a moment to wrap his head around the case, doesn’t like where it goes. Too many different girls, too many places they were abducted from. I-45 really was a highway to hell. No cell service, sultry drags of lonely land that stretched 25 miles- lousy with brush and low squatting trees perfect for cover. Not all the girls had ended up in the killing fields, but Sam knew they were all related. The destruction of the face, the bound hands and feet, this thing was just hitting its stride. Sam could see the pattern; watch the killing get more sophisticated, less easy to track. If he had to guess, there was a shit-ton of bodies out there that hadn’t been found. This thing hadn’t slowed down. The cops had already ruled that out due to time, but Sam knew some things died hard, lurked through generations until someone came along to send them packing back to Eve.   
He toys with the idea of summoning one of the girls up, but A) he’s not sure where they ended up, B) he doesn’t think they’d be much help. Violent deaths just came back reliving their final moments, getting through to them was chipping at concrete with a spoon. Can’t leave even the dead alone, death was supposed to mean it was over. Sometimes he feels like he’s drowning in unquiet graves. Rubbing his eyes of grit- just a constant reminder of that open patch of earth waiting for all of us.   
It’s almost funny; the fact the death omen picks now to appear to Sam. All those morbid thoughts of gaping maws of earth must have summoned her up. At one point she was beautiful, well a different -verdant kind of beautiful anyway. Sam can still see it in the bones. There aren’t words, just that arm up pointing at Sam with those long fingers, the almost bone white flesh washed in grave dirt brown. Sam feels the urgency in the movement, even though the unfurling is slow. She winks out and comes back at the window, beckoning fingers making Sam shrug into his jacket as he crosses the threshold. He calls Dean and it goes to voicemail, chops out a message as he follows the flickering of her existence. When he sees her in the Impala, it stops his heart. There’s a shuddering he can’t control, the bars closed now, and he calls Dean again before he realizes- Deans not fucking home right now. He grabs the spare key he always keeps on him, and follows the dead girl. 

Dean’s seen a lot of shit in his day. This isn’t the first time a shifter’s gotten the jump on him, and he berates himself for that alone. But Shifters in groups? The creepy fuckers were usually loners. He glares at the skin thief, tailored to look like you and can’t help but see the errors, the not you of it. Somethings off- the shifter can’t hold your form right. It’s getting frustrated, the jumble of thoughts coming out are confused, snorkeling in muddy water. It keeps petting your face like it would better the WIFI between you, and Deans happy for once that you’re out cold. It had worn his face at first, before Hell had taken over; it shuddered out of there pretty quick. Watching his face slide off like Raiders of the Lost Ark had made his stomach twinge.   
It was driveling on- mocking him dressed up like you, but he was ignoring it, damn near tearing his head off to look at you. “Dean-o,” It mocks, “Had a wife and couldn’t keep her.” It sings the last part, and Deans still surprised. Part of it’s the rhyme, the implication, then there’s the surprise punch in his gut at the sound of your voice carrying any tune, clear like a bell.   
“I bet it kills you, all the things I’ll never ask for. Words that leaves holes with their vacancy. I bet you think about it at night when you’re prancing through my head like a thief. All those things that make a life, drag a man out of the dark, I had that with Ken-doll you. All I have with you is waiting to die.” Fake you mocks him, that god-damn smirk alive on the alien face. The shifter focuses back on you, and Deans ready to interact. The ropes hold, even the small knife he’d worked out of his sleeve wasn’t making much of a dent in it.   
He might be able to crawl out of any grave dug for him, but you weren’t.   
He tries praying to Cas, even though just the word prayer makes him want to spit like he has a bad taste in his mouth. He thinks you’ll care more about not being dead then having your least favorite person show up. He appreciates that practicality about you. He doesn’t have much hope, (never did really) even now he can feel the ley line surge beneath him, knows its going to scramble the signal, especially with all the blood it’s been fed. Dean could feel those invisible lines in the earth, where it would call out for something. Hears it whisper in his ear sometimes. Figures since he dug his way out of a grave smack on top of one, they all recognize him now. No matter what he’s been, the earth knows him. In and out. Like a spurned lover, she could be a bitter bitch.   
When he sees you finally come to, he can almost feel your bewilderment about the damage to your face. Your shoulder tenses when you try to reach up and touch it. The shifter must have beaten on you after you were out, pretty pissed about the knife thing. Dean never saw the point of hurting someone who wasn’t awake to feel it. Doling out pain was only fun when you had a participating audience. It feels like cheating to fuck someone up while they’re unconscious. 

 

Nighttime’s different in the middle of nowhere, you can only hear the whisper of trees and the sheer nothingness takes on a texture- it’s that salty tin flavor in the back of your throat, you can feel the press of that dark empty land- it carries such weight. The eye you’ve got operational is weary, so adjusting enough to recognize yourself from the back, well here’s an opportunity to check out your own ass. Dean would have laughed at that.  
Hearing your own voice, disembodied and strange makes the urge to panic a little more pressing, seeing that half-turned face with your profile makes sweaty nightmares return. You try to focus- but between whatever damage they’ve done to your head and the terror clawing its way up, you’re not sure how much to trust what you’re seeing. Scars flicker across your skin, there and then not. Tattoos dance the edges of your jeans; hair seems to grow and cut itself short. But the lights flickering and your head hurts, so what do you know?   
“What are you,” the shifter whispers, too close to your face now, predatory. It reminds you of the moment in Alien when it’s getting upfront and personal with Ripley. “I’ll tell you what you’re not, you’re not a hero.” The thing that looks like you mocks softly, “Even before this, you were more like me.” It licks the side of your face- blood, sweat, and mud all caked together. It makes a sound in its throat then-pornographic, guttural. You hope that’s not a noise that comes out of your real mouth but according to Dean’s face, it definitely is. You slam your head into its nose, see your own face light up with surprise and pain before it’s nasally replies, “You like that crunch of bone don’t you.” It laughs through the blood as it stands up; greeting someone you can’t see yet.   
“God this mind…you’re drowning in secrets aren’t you hot lips? Just looking at him dredges them all up doesn’t it? You missed the tour I did in Lover boy earlier, and oh boy that was interesting. All kinds of hot nasty bubbling up there. “ He’s circling you and Dean now, debating who to break first. You almost laugh, like this assclown could even scratch Dean’s obsidian surface.   
Deans still staring at you, won’t even look at the shifter, “He can’t get it up unless you cry.” There’s a snort after that, Dean’s got lines all over the place but dick jokes and performance are on the tippy top of that list.   
Well you’re safe then. Done cried yourself out in a dream, tears weren’t on the menu anymore. Every time the shifter closed your eyes, tried to shift through your memories, its head would twitch and like the brewing of a gnarly headache, he’d rub the skin at the bridge of your nose. There are too many lives stuffed in there, had to be some interference for this world’s version of you. Didn’t know which to taunt you with.   
“So many locked doors,” the funhouse mirror asshole whispers. “You’re special,” it leans over and brushes some of your hair back, lingering on your neck, “and man it’s gonna be sweet when you scream. You wanna know what Dean-o over there really thinks about you?”  
You encase your heart in ice, hyper focus on the attempt to open your other eye, the pain in your head, that burning twist to the ropes that hold you. That tendon in the bottom of your foot is tight again, you try flexing it out a few times. Your left ring finger has a torn cuticle that you keep trying to worry back into full pain, anything to distract yourself. The thing keeps droning on, but you block it out like noise, only comprehending parts of words.

Dean’s never seen someone able to disassociate as well as you. You’d be able to ignore the devil himself. The shifter is prying you open, bleeding out Deans secrets as well as yours, and he can see your foot flexing, working out a kink. You almost look bored. When it starts to hit you, Dean laughs in earnest; pain was just another thing you’d build into a wall. He starts to get nervous, the feeling unfamiliar territory. He didn’t know how long the shifter had been there, ferreting out information before Dean’s memories drove him out. The nightmares that Dean carried had teeth and weren’t particular about who they’d bite. That’s what worried him now, his ultimate nightmare after the obvious Sam dying or hell shit. The secret he carried like a stone around his neck. 

When you see the old man, you do a double take; you’d assumed he was the shifter. That unfortunately means you’d let a fucking shifter finger you. Still better than some of my ex’s. The shifter crosses to him, and they sloppily make out, and that breaks your reverie. Gross. What happened to the fucking bartender’s code man? They both turn, heads together- foreheads touching almost tenderly and the shifters voice ripples into Dean’s, ” Ripping it out of you now, after all this time isn’t the same as you giving it. And I’m so fuckin tired. Tired of wanting something I shouldn’t want. Something that doesn’t even want me back. A small slice of pie isn’t worth it, and you know it.”  
They laugh, and Dean’s face gets stonier. They taunt you with how Dean felt seeing you with someone else knuckle deep inside, how venomous his thoughts were in those moments. The old man (God, is he fucking human?) cups your crotch while you just stare through him. Dean snarls, bindings roping him in tighter, you see the bulge of his muscles curling under the test of that rope. He surges up far enough it makes the old man scramble off you, fear blooming like surprise on his face. He looks to the shifter, like a parent and something occurs to you, “You adopted him, didn’t you? A fucking shifter adopting a human. That’s cute. Couldn’t have a monster baby of your own?”  
“I saved him,” he growls back in your most serious tone. “He’s more mine then he ever was theirs. I carved them up- Thanksgiving style, just for him. Even in this suit,” he gestures down your body like a magic trick,” can’t reproduce. Not a shifter, a Sin-eater. And Scott here, Scott’s my son, my constant, my successor.”  
Deans face screws into something interested; it’s been awhile since they’d met a new monster.   
“What the fuck is that?” The Catholic upbringing and a Heath Ledger movie compete for dominance in your head. Dean mouths Heath Ledger at you and you want to laugh at the way, even now, those fucking parallels you both draw are still there.   
“I make you all shiny and new. I’m not some monster of Eve’s, girl. I’m made by God, same as you. Put me here, well my line anyway, to give you wretched things a second chance. I’m humanities get-out-of-jail-free card.”  
“Some of these fucking girls were twelve, you prick.”  
“Oh, that hit a cord for you didn’t it?” The Sin-eater straddles your lap, and your mind bends a little at that. “Daddy get a little too close?” The twisted reflection of you palms your breast, watching your face as it flickers into Dean. It’s so fucking fast it takes your brain longer to catch up, stumbling over what’s now Dean’s voice, but a tone off, a shitty radio connection. “Not him, but somebody…somebody your Daddy found out about. Looked at you like soiled goods after, didn’t he? Showed you how girls who tease get treated.” he mock-whispers, too loud for Dean not to hear. He looks frustrated, trying to beat at whatever walls were in your head with an icepick.   
When you don’t react, it slings off you, turning to Dean. “Something else you have in common, right Winchester? Man, your Daddy had those heavy hands too, didn’t he? Took a lot of training to beat that no outta ya, didn’t it?” His hands are out, a mock Jesus, mimicking Dean’s exasperated stance.   
He stunts back into your clone- looking coy now, “You still think about them sometimes-at night, when that humidity gets up. Think about knees bleeding in gravel parking lots, that sweaty trucker smell you could never wash off.” The Sin-eater smiles at Dean, and its nasty on your face, you hoped that contorted sneer was unnatural, something you never wore. “Things get awful tight with two mouths to feed, long days on the road, and well Sam, Sam was the baby. Sam had to be saved. But not you. Not Daddy’s little instrument.”   
“Fuck you,” you don’t shout it, you don’t have to. It’s the final word tone, that take-no-shit fact delivery.   
“Sin’s sin, according to God,” and he’s Dean again, your face and body flowing off like water. The Sin-eater turns Dean’s particular brand of nasty, that sarcastic pitiless face. “It was theirs to bear too, those girls you’re so worried about. Ate it all up so they could walk through the pearly gates. You lot should be thanking me. How else would you get there? Without me? Eternity in the pit. Something your boyfriend here would know a shit-ton about.”   
You and Dean twin your response. “He’s/ I’m not my/her boyfriend.”  
“That’s adorable,” the Old man speaks, apparently. “Let’s keep them awhile.”  
“We’ve got plenty of time to play Scott.”  
Something clicks in your head, “Your name’s Scott? I was really hoping it’d be Damien or something. Warlock maybe. I mean you were raised by a monster. And Scott? Evil side-kick Scott,” you try it out before laughing. Deans cracking a smile too, but it’s a warning more than amusement. Still, that half smile is better than Scott’s reaction.   
Scott kicks you in the face instead of laughing. Must have been really funny then. Always pisses people off the most.  
You start to spit up more blood, so much that the sin eater licks it out of your mouth. Knowing what else you coughed up, you smile a little. Enjoy my lung butter asshole. That’s his thing, got to eat something of us to keep up the link. You look at Dean and see that he’s caught on too. This could be a long fucking night. He’s switched again, that new blood flushing you to the surface.   
“Oh, you’re a piece of work, all those lies stitched together, do you even know who you are anymore? Dean over there, well he’s got a mission. The good fight. Righteousness on his side. Hell and back, down payment cashed. But you…’ he gathers Scott up like he’d shield him from you, “You’re about as deep and dark as any ocean I’ve ever seen. You’re the fucking Mariana Trench.”   
Deans looking at you, undecipherable now. The weight of his gaze is painful, it strips everything away.   
Scott and Daddy-shifter focus on Dean now, making your nightmares come true. Your shitty life in graphic detail. A lifetime of groping hands and hard punishment- some done to you, some meted out by you. A bloody trail through the Midwest. You let yourself think about your brother. About the price of peace, one you’d already paid. The hollow life after. Bought and paid for with your brothers’ life- something you’d carved out for yourself and never got to live for longer than 6 months.   
“You killed your own brother.” It’s not a question; Dean’s flat delivery stabs your ears. There’s a sneer in there, something superior. You finally let yourself stare back at him, the dead part of your eyes coming out.   
“Yes.” There’s no emotion to it. It’s a confession without being contrite. The subzero lack of response titillates Scott. Hands are going places again; Scott’s behind you, mouth locked on your neck, staring down at its Daddy’s hands and you can feel the level of excitement against your back.   
You’re becoming a thing they discuss instead of a person in the next exchange.  
”We could both have her, like the last one,” Scott insinuates. The thought of them doing that to a much younger girl curls your lip in disgust.  
“This one’s going to be for you, I think you’d like two girls for once.”   
“As long as I can still have her ass.”  
“We have all the time in the world, Love. We can do everything, you can have him too if you want.”  
The Sin-eaters palming its way up your front, but you’re so frozen into that locked stare with Dean, you barely register. Even when those hands brave going beneath clothes, you don’t break that battleship stare. The twisted duo are so magnetized over what’s happening, even your stoic response to it that they’re blind. It’s palpable, so much so that you almost miss the girl flickering in. The girl from the alley in all her rotting glory.   
And she’s followed by Sam. With the freak show focused on you, both arched up to tenderly kiss the other, they never see it coming. Sam stabs the shifter through the heart, the silver glinting off the point that’s found its way through the shifter -almost to your forehead. The arterial spray washes you in macabre and thank god you remembered to close your damn mouth. He falls against you, and suddenly- you’re holding yourself in your lap.   
You were tired of watching yourself die.   
As Sam’s making quick work of his partner, Scott had peeled off you and ran faster than you would have expected, the Sin-eater rasps out, “He knew. He knew the way home this whole time. Could ‘a clicked your heels together- There’s no place like…” He dies before he can finish. It’s not like the word meant anything to him anyway.   
That ice cracks around your heart, a sliver beating into pain. 

Deans sweating, he’s still tied to this fucking tree while Sam fucks about with sidekick Scott. He wants to leap over to the shifter, cut him off. Keeps retracing the past like reimagining ways he could’ve stopped it would get him a DeLorean.   
When he sees your face, he knows. He told you. He told you everything.   
He’d found a way for you to go home. Months ago. While he’s at it, he’d been walking around in your head too. Neither of which you’d forgive him for. Something between a curse and a scream come out and it immediately raises Sam hackles enough to hack at the ropes holding him. He’s on his knees tearing at your ropes before you can blink or roll the shifter off with your legs. You let him. But you don’t look at him, even after you peel the other eye open and almost collapse in relief that you can still see.   
Sam drags Scott back to the little clearing, half dead and still crying. He throws him down toward you with an eyebrow, he saved him for you. Palming the knife Dean presses to you, you slit his throat. You kick his still twitching body towards the Sin-eaters. They fucking deserve each other and whatever hells coming. The Death Omen flashes in one last time, a silent nod later and she flickers out for the last time, an almost smile on her skeletal face.   
You cut out the Sin-eaters heart, just to be sure.   
The fire you burn them in is so tall it makes you think almost childish thoughts. Wondering about the flammability of Sin-eaters- or is it just a douchebag thing? That cooking meat smell is in the air, and despite the way it also turns your stomach, it makes you think of greasy diners.  
Sam watches the fire he helped make and before you know it he’s melting into the trees, headed back to civilization.  
You want to stay, make sure they burn into nothing but…that means being alone with Dean. He’s drilling holes into the side of your head already and you wished you could ride the flames up and out of here, wander the dark night on sparks.  
When Dean wants you to hang back, that slight tug on your arm where his fingertips have dared, you shake him off like a creeper. Being touched is not high on your priority list; being touched by Dean is akin to touching a live wire of rage. He won’t let it go, takes the hits he’s earned when he spins you around.  
“You motherfucker.” You grunt out, and it’s got more dispassion than the rage Dean was hoping for. He couldn’t touch you when you were that ice princess.   
“Will you just listen, you stubborn piece of…”  
“No, you don’t deserve anything from me you fucking piece of shit. You knew this whole time how to send me home. Home Dean. My own fucking family.”  
“Where you killed your own fucking brother apparently!”  
“You don’t know shit about that. You don’t get to fucking preach to me about stuff you don’t know shit about!” Your voice is rising now; you were losing the battle with calm. “I hate you. I hate you because you know better. I hate you because you keep taking my choices away.”  
“They were the wrong fucking choices!” Dean screams back, “You wanted me too, you fucking worshipped me from the sounds of it. Too much for you to have me in the flesh. Don’t I live up to your written drivel in that goddamn show? I’m not the one living a lie here, Sweetheart.”  
“You wanna fuck? Let’s fuck then.”


	6. Losing My Religion

“You wanna fuck? Let’s fuck then.” The words cut out of your throat, still raspy after being choked out. You shove Dean back, challenge fresh in your eyes, there sweat ticking down and you feel like you’re going to burst out of your skin.  
There are moments in your life where immediate regret is felt keenly. The heartbeat before pain when you stub your toe, that slip of the knife against your fingers- before there’s blood.  
Dean’s not the hero here. He calls your bluff and rises to the occasion, stalking you. You snap up to him, twist your fingers painfully in his hair and battle with his tongue when you fuse your mouth to his. He shoves you back into the nearest tree, hard enough to chuff out a surprised breath from you, caging you in with a snarl. He manages your pants off, those jerky tugs finally freeing your legs enough for him to get a grip on hot skin. When he boosts you up, you react with a defensive elbow to the throat, but it doesn’t stop the bark clawing up your back thanks to the force Dean’s exerting. It tears through the thin shirt you’re wearing- Dean gathers the flaps in his hands and rips downward. You barely feel that sudden snap of the collar releasing, twined around him like ivy, his dicks already pressed flush against what the Sin-Eater coveted. Avoiding his eyes, you sink your teeth into his shoulder, the taut meat of it, punishingly hard. He makes a sound like a dying man, fisting a handful of hair he rips you up to look him in the eye.   
“I’m not a good man. I’ve been a lot of things, and not too many of them were good, but you knew that, didn’t you,” he kisses you wet and deep and it has a bite to it that’s going to kill the flavor of anything else. The sheer stillness of him is letting awkwardness creep in, this is fucking. Just fucking. You want it so fast it can’t catch up with regret till you’re back in the car.   
“And here I thought you were penitent.” The joke falls flat, mostly because of the grief cutting from it.   
“I can be whatever you want. I know what you need.” He grinds against you, patient now. That earlier violence tamped down by iron control.   
“How fucking selfless of you,” there’s almost a sob there but you swallow it, swallow your pride too. You’re choking on the razor blade cut of it.   
“Oh, I’m gonna take what I want, I’ll rip it out of you screaming if I have to.” The words are so carnal they burn, so violently edged there’s a ghost of a shiver working a nervous trail down your spine. That cold kiss of his knife against your skin before it rips through your bra is unbearably erotic. He hands you the knife and you let it drop, sticking out of the dirt like a headstone. You palm the front of his shirt and halve it down the middle, following that tear down his chest as far as you can with your mouth. There’s your slow drag of fingernails against his skin, on the edge of pain, it makes goosebumps rise on his arms.   
His hands are everywhere, burning trails of possession, falling stars in the night. Lightning strikes too close, too often. Dean’s feeling his way across you like a blind man, the braille of your body familiar under his grip. He’s muttering unintelligible things; you catch pieces but not the whole-“Fucking shifter fingering…touching…wasn’t his…” You rip his face back up to you by the hair, devouring his mouth. There’s blood in this kiss, you’re already paying for what’s about to happen.  
His hands are as rough as his words, that angry grip that makes lies of his promises. This isn’t what you need- it’s what he needs. Again. Drowning in other people’s needs may be accustomed, but fuck does it make you weary. He sucks on your tongue hard enough for you to almost snap out of the lust daze you’re under- but it stokes the fire and you nip back at him hard enough for him to retreat from your mouth.   
He shifts his grip, one arm’s curved around your ass now and he brushes against your pussy, that little graze is enough to have you dripping. That jingle of his belt releasing makes your stomach drop and tighten. But he goes to nibble on your breasts, lavishing both tongue and teeth until you’re making that carnal growl you didn’t think belonged to you. You reach blindly around for his dick, but your arms aren’t long enough so you dig narrow fingers into his hip bones where you can, communicating urgency.   
It’s furious until he’s inside you, and everything goes quiet.  
Home, you think. I’m Home.  
Home’s that too-firm grip anchoring you to the tree. It’s that gut feeling, the way he doesn’t take his time, just buries himself in you the way he tries to do with his emotions, it flashes and burns inside you like a reprimand. You’ll feel the memory of this tomorrow and a tear slips out when you realize that’s the only thing you can take with you. It’s a relief when the rain finally comes, washes that softness away.   
A grin slips out that you can feel against your neck, those charmingly crooked teeth nipping at your skin.   
His thrusts gentle, drawing things out of you that you don’t want to give. He kisses you with a lie of tenderness, of promises that can’t be kept and gentleness that will never be yours in the light. Tempers it with rough knuckles and hard squeezes, fucking things out of you like he used to fight them out.   
The more you try to avoid that gaze, rain slipping between you to muddy things up, the harsher he fucks you. The smell of him, mixed with the rain was almost feral.  
“You act like you never took the slip and slide thinking about this. I know you wondered what it’d be like to have me buried here,” he reaches down to where you’re joined, fingers scissoring over himself as he penetrates you. “So fucking deep you don’t know where I end, and you begin.”  
You don’t say anything back, but he twitches as your pussy about strangles his dick as you go over the edge. There’s a dark laugh that chops out of him, almost demeaning it’s so self-satisfied. Even though your blind with the white out of unexpected orgasm, you rake your nails down his back to cut that laugh off. In retaliation, he presses fingertip shaped bruises into your hips enough times to make a chess board. You howl when he shifts you up the tree, skin grinding off-clashing against that delicious slide of him inside you. A hot trickle of blood runs down, matching rends of skin on both your backs, blood mixing in your almost grave, washed together by rain.   
He fucks you through the orgasm, even when you beg him to stop, take a break. He’s relentless- wringing everything out of you that he can. He’s on your neck, mouth sucking purple claims all over you, fingers sneaking up to tweak your nipples painfully and you return the favor. But his favorite is reaching between you, by himself, or jabbing your hand down with his, and feeling where you were joined and slipping up to push firmly against your clit. He’s got the heel of his hand pressed painfully tight against it when you come again, and you know he can feel it rush out of you, but you’re too strung out to be embarrassed.   
At this point you’re so tight you wonder how he’s even managing to keep thrusting, but Deans the little engine that could today. Even when you sob out-“I can’t,” he grunts back-“You will.”  
And you do. You almost black out with it, the orgasm crashes over you so hard you tremble, and death grip him. It’s finally too much for Dean – he’s coming too, the hot jet of it running over your ass as you’re still rippling around him. He doesn’t pull out- waits for every last twitch of his dick to be over before leaving your body.  
When he releases you, you fall on boneless legs, cum still dripping out. He wipes himself off with what’s left of his shirt and tosses you a piece. It takes this action for your brain to catch up- he fucking nutted in you.   
What. The. Fuck.  
“You blew your fucking load in me!”  
He just shrugs at you, your fury not chipping away his calm. Dean can’t say the words he wants to- they don’t belong out here so close to torn open secrets and heart ripping fucking. Those words don’t belong anywhere, anymore. Fratricide. Jesus fucking Christ. He knew you’d be someone else, been something else- before. But that? And he wasn’t in the mood to hear your shit about his decisions. Not mistakes- decisions. It was only dream root for fucks sake, and you were like a god damn brick wall. As for you going home, well, you were better off here.  
There’s a motion with his hand that wants to be tenderness, but isn’t. Too deep, too much exposure for Dean. He likes you in that comfortable sliver of maybe and never.   
“From what I hear tonight, that’s the best shit to ever come outta you.”  
“I’m gonna fucking kill you.”  
“It’s not like I could leave money on the dresser out here.”  
“You couldn’t afford it anyway, you fucking drifter redneck. And from what our late-night monster special was saying, Maybe I should pay you. Or do monetary transactions only work in trucker stops?” Your tone goes flat, you’ve checked out of this.   
“Jesus fucking Christ, you make me fucking crazy. I’mma go get you a shirt so your tits aren’t staring at me then we’re going to hack this shit out- once and for all.”  
You try to disassociate, try shoring that wall between you and him back up but the drawbridge is broken. The shame of giving in, losing the great fight after all. It’s crumbling now, and Dean can see it. The loss of him in the other world, the feel of death brushing by you again guised in familiarity, having everything you wanted tossed in your face like it was ugly- there’s a grief of a loss so profound- it’s a well without a bottom.   
That’s when the truth slaps you upside the head, all that wavering- you’d had an entire lifetime of almost.  
Almost isn’t good enough anymore.  
Bleed for you, die for you, love you -without doubt, beyond loyalty. That’s the thing that you wanted. That’s what you’d left your old life behind for. It’s what you wrote fanfiction about, why you’d loved Supernatural to begin with. Because without Dean loving you like he’d loved Sam, was it worth it? Is Almost ever worth it? You knew the answer. You’d always known.   
“Horseshoes and Hand grenades.” You don’t have to shout it; noise carries out here despite the rain still pelting pin pricks into your upper body.   
Dean stops, but his back is already to you, you can’t see the expression that’s wearing him but his body’s tight like refusal. He keeps walking because, well, where the fuck are you gonna go? This is all you have left, and he knows it. All the things that could make you want to stay are rusting from disuse.   
He leaves you there in the dark, the wet rain slapping you in the face now. You may want something, but you want the truth of it. Not some pretend fiasco. You’d both worn enough masks in this life. But truth requires truth, and the question burning out of Dean’s eyes was about your brother. About bodies buried but not dead. A lifetime of being the bad guy Sometimes when you start fires, everyone gets burned.   
You shrug on what’s left of your shirt- backwards. It’s a gaping mess, but the girls are covered. Dean’s already melted into the tall grass and night like he was never there. You work Dean’s knife out of the ground, consider seriously walking to the interstate a few miles to hitch, and settle on tucking your arms around yourself closer to the fire.   
Dean still had all your shit back at the motel. You could strike out after that.   
When you wish this hard for a violent change, there’s always a god around to give it to you.   
The fire hadn’t burned itself out yet, not even the rain could quench that climbing greedy lick. Across the flames, a man stood, too still like a corpse. That amount of stillness is unnatural, marks you as other. The knife you’d claimed was already up, you weren’t getting fucked again, in any sense of the word.   
When the man got close enough, it froze you up worse than the Sin Eater. You’d know God anywhere.   
“It’s Chuck, actually.”  
You knew that but damn it was weird to wrap your mouth around. The guy was pulling at you like dark matter, and the smile he wears is a dark thing. It’s too wide and too knowing.   
“Looking for a way out?”  
Your silence is heard, he doesn’t need your voice to know what you want.   
“Happens to be I’ve got one, one-way ticket. No returns.”   
He’s circling you now and a few frames are missing from the movie, it’s almost too fast for your eyes to catch the shudder, but it’s there enough to make the hair on the back of your neck screech up. Your hearts gone sluggish with the grip of it, each slow beat is a funeral drum in your inner ear.   
“This is a great spot, don’cha think? All that old power coming up from the ground. Old roads beneath it.” Chucks trying to emulate friendly neighborhood God here, but what’s emanating from him seem remarkably like wrath. You back up a little, knife still out-daring.  
“What’s it cost?” It’s a scoff of a question.   
“Well, now that’s a smart question from a smart girl ain’t it. How do you know I’m not just here to help a friend out?” He points up toward his head when he rounds the word smart- almost like it’s a joke. He petitions you, hands extended in a gesture of peace, but again you’re not buying it. You know fake when you see it, and Chuck’s coming off as fresh China plastic.   
“Nothing’s free. Especially from you. You know that shit they say right- you flip God, ‘ya get Dog.”  
He’s pissed now, that friendly light winking out of his eyes. There’s something infinitely older there, some partially sleeping giant that has seen generations of you pass from this world, will live to see your greatest of grandchildren bend down with age. It makes sweat curl on your upper lip,   
“You’re fucking up the story here. Nobody likes a one-night stand that won’t go away. Or even worse, a Mary Sue. You get it, you’re a writer, right? Wrote some fanfiction on my greatest hits, didn’t you? All that carousing about in your skull, keeping the way home from you, I thought he’d signed his own ticket there. But nooooo, you still fuck the guy. Classy.”   
“Alright Almighty Dick, get me the fuck outta here. Tell me what I gotta do.”  
All the joking pretense goes out of his voice- “Trial by Fire.”  
He twists his fingers into an arch, and flames follow orders well. It looks like a door, but the middle burns so hot-its white. Hot enough to not walk away from.  
“Ya, that’s not gonna work, you scoff. I’d like to make it there alive.”   
“Look kid, you’re shitting in my sandbox here. I want you gone. It’ll hurt… not kill- but, well, nature abhors a vacuum, and that’s what you are. A vacuum of should have from a godless universe. You shouldn’t be here at all. You feel that don’t you? The wrongness of it.”   
He sees too far. That boiling pit inside you has a hell of a flashlight on it now. You taking deep breaths trying to muster up the stones to walk through that door, march into the fire. Fire had reshaped you before, that pain had forged you into something new. That second baptism you’d endured, flames locking your skin into a new shape. You and Dean both had been remade by fire, its greedy transmorphic nature had defined most of your lives in one way or another. It was kind of fitting that this way home was cloaked in it. It didn’t erase the fear though. That dry sweat and clutch-in-your- stomach-no-fucking-way feeling was stuck on you. You’d never wanted to feel that kiss of death upon you again. This was the way out of all the losing battles and whiskey nights of you and Dean. Of heartbreaks eventual return, the kind that ended lives. This was a twisted love, the kind that strangles, that burns.  
Sears you before burning out.   
And you were done with it.  
You take a step towards the scorching portal, and Chuck gently stops you- lays a hand against the burn scars that ride your arm, like he knows what you’re thinking. Fuck, he probably does. You stare at him with contempt and dredge up enough of it to drown the fear out.  
“I am curious though…Knowing everything now- having Dean exactly the way you thought you wanted-what did it cost? What would it cost to keep it?”  
“Everything. All it cost was everything.”   
“Ohh, I’m gonna use that line.” Chuck looks down like he’s going to write it on his hand.   
You walked backwards thru the fire gate, middle finger up- right as it’s too late for Chuck to wreak any vengeance on you- hell seemed better than losing your pride, losing the last word on freaking God.   
Dean can only watch you disintegrate into the fire, he’s too late to even shout your name. His long stride eating up dirt between you just to grasp at nothing. He lunges at Chuck, who is already laughing, guffawing really. Chuck flicks him off like an irritating bug, Dean reverse sliding against the ground.  
“Oh Dean-o, you’re never gonna learn are ya? You’re a sad story. I love watching you twist beautifully on that rope.”  
“I’m going to fucking kill you.”  
“Dean, Dean , Dean, the grapes of wrath still make a decent wine. Hate me all you want. It just sweetens the taste.”  
Chuck winks out, the fire burns down to nothing. Its a long time before Sam checks back to find Dean, hands full of ashes.


	7. The Cain Instinct

Fire is greedy.  
It takes and it takes.   
Like a bad boyfriend, too high rent, crushing debt- all of it, all at once. Seems cold at first, licking at your skin-frost kissed. Runs up your neurons wrong, takes too long to register as hot. Those nerves die, but never quickly enough, that searing agony travels up and down and never lessens. It’s not like a cut that improves with heartbeats.   
You’re whittling away to ash, parts of you drifting away. Olfactory memory lasts the longest, for you, it’s tied so tight to fear that your muscles lock up at the the overdone steak scent of your flesh cooking; that wiry burnt hair odor that always accompanies it. Cramped legs tear through steps anyway, arms reach out for salvation that you can’t see. Everything is that bright white of heat, it makes you miss the dark. You almost turn back a thousand times, head back to Dean. Every step is agony, which is why- when it stops, you stare about stupidly- still shuddering from remembered pain. Curling into a ball, you still try to smooth your skin back together, but it’s fine, like it never happened.   
There’s no threshold, the transition from fire to field was flawless, there’s still smoke streaming off you, but there’s no damage, even the pains fading away. Still shaking, laying in that grass that had never felt so fine, damp and cold in perfect measure. The worlds more solid here, not built on the foundation of dreams-you can feel the edges locking into place.  
Home. It’s home.   
Great and terrible, nauseous and liberating all at once. Even now, what you want is yo-yoing so badly- one heartbeat says home, the next sighs Dean. That push-pull of wanting tenderness, but not the tether that comes with it. Being tethered to Dean was almost grounds for mocking, only safe to put on a pedestal when he wasn’t real. Dean was a lot of things, but the way he saw you, beneath all the shit, was scary. You were trying to be someone else; you’d started over in your last life- thought all this shit was behind you. But the past is never behind you, you live in it, saturated with it. The past is not a weight you can put down, and- when you think of Dean- the loneliness isn’t a coat you can take off.  
You might be done with the past, but the past is never done with you.  
You hitch a ride back to southern Illinois, a few truck stops later and you’re stepping off in that lazy corn that frames St. Louis. It’s still a walk back to your house, but when you get there, everything deceptively the same, just the dust to prove you were gone. When you look at your computer you almost think it was a dream, but Dean’s knife is still burning a hole in your pocket and you feel the memory of him inside you, your back and hips tell black and blue stories about how well you know him.  
There’s no power, no water, and the food in the fridge has grown its own ecosystem. Your key is on the table, thick with dust, and you suppose this is a message from your boyfriend from about six months ago. There’s a hollow echo in your heart at that small sign, but it’s dwarfed by whatever had crept in behind it. Whoever had crept in behind it.   
After you’re decent, you drive (after having to jump the fucking car) that green mile to the hospital. Even though you’re dead on your feet, they still know where to take you. Your mother is still here, and you sag a little against the door in relief. Nothing prepares you for the sight of her, skeletal and hollow, a ghost already. You’re digging up words that won’t bury her when your father emerges from the bathroom and has you up against the wall before you can blink.  
“Care to explain where you’ve been?”  
Care to explain was his favorite phrase, it’s more rhetorical, what it really means is- you fucked up bad and there are a thousand painful ways you’re going to regret it. Normally, this would’ve been cause for at least a yellow alert, but after a year of Dean, the pain barely registers. Before you would have taken this quietly, with a bloody smile; but too much training and too much Dean later and you’re elbowing his arms out and slamming him to the wall. There’s that dark sense of satisfaction there, a keen thrill at having bested him. Laughter bubbles out, amd its edged with something so dark its grating. Your mother lies there, crying, her heart could never bend enough to choose sides. You’re so close to having it, he lies there, bloody and beaten, matching bruises around his throat. As you are admiring your handiwork, he threatens, “ I’ll pull all the funding for her. She can die painful for all I care.” Your puppet strings snap back into place, always this for that; same as paying for your brothers school, or your mothers flowers. All the small things that made it life and not just existing, paid for with sweat and blood and things you don’t want to think about.   
Your victory is hollow.   
Deans dug holes, prayed to Gods, bled all over the place trying to reopen that door. Sam finally drags him out, getting him back to the bunker only for Dean’s obsession to reroute to lore. Dean won’t take cases, won’t listen to Sam’s lectures about choice and options. Sam eventually gives up and leaves to spend time at Jody’s, claiming he wants to check her half of Bobby’s lore. Dean makes several underhanded comments about Jody’s “lore” that Sam wants to inspect. Do they think he’s stupid? They been banging away at each other for so long, Deans almost insulted they haven’t given up the ghost of pretense. He’s tracked souls through Hell, run successful cons since he was six. There’s no hiding shit from him, not anymore. When he tells Sam as much, he replies, “ Think about why you think its ok for me to have shit like this - but you won’t let yourself.” That shuts Dean up faster than a zipper, but he gets his defences up enough to bark at Sam’s back, “ Don’t give me that ‘meant to be’ crap.” Dean may have gotten in the last word, but he knows he’s lost.   
Its late now, not that you can ever really tell in the bunker, but the night hours always feel different to Dean, the clock runs slower and even the bunker seem still. This glass of whiskey is somewhere in the low teens for the night and its rich with reminiscing. Those first weeks in the bunker after they’d cut you loose from the chair, when Dean had brought back small angel and a devil’s food cakes and made you choose. He could laugh now about pulling a gun on you for the devil’s food.  
“Who the fuck thinks chocolate is evil? How is that the evil choice? Angel food cake tastes fake; that shit is evil.” You’ve got your hands wrapped around the cake-protecting it while giving him the fuck off and die stare.  
Sam had broken that golden oldie up. Then there was the time on that werewolf hunt where you’d snagged the kill shot and he couldn’t admit that.  
“You were literally facing the other direction Winchester. Unless this universe is based on the Matrix, you didn’t send this one to meet his furry god.” He’d waited to laugh but damn that one had busted his gut with all the furry implications. Even startled a laugh outta Sam.  
Then there were the long nights-like tonight, where just having your shoulder next to his had warmed up the cold that built inside him, cigarette smoke mixing in the air where he could smell the salt tang on your skin and wanted to taste it.  
There were a thousand moments, down to when he’d entered the haven of your body, violence finding peace.  
The loss of you ached like a bone that wasn’t set right. There was arthritis in Dean’s heart now and no amount of booze or violence could shake it loose. He thinks about the nexus of lies that make up his life, how lying’s luxury and a burden both. He thinks of all the things he has to continually mend to keep them going- their clothes, their skin, the car. Stitching everything back together again, even when it’s a little less after, could never be the same as before. That ragged hem he kept slapping on was no better than a band aid.  
When you left, your mother, well-the woman who raised you, had just been diagnosed and that tinny bright sheen of hope had hovered over the whole ordeal. Now, a year out, she was vanishing into the sheets that covered her bed. You’d avoided thinking about in in Winchesterland, like voicing it, even in your head, would summon it up like the devil. That wet jarring cough was the only noise she’d make, the time for speaking long over. You held her hand anyway, some small piece of your heart that wasn’t tainted still beating out maybe, maybe, maybe. There’s a knowing to it, full stop-end of the line, but you were stuttering and unbalanced by the brakes.  
Nobody talks about the all fuck out boredom of watching someone die; the beige of the hospital room, the ceaseless click of the clock hands. Purgatory’s a hospital room hushed, like it’s holding its breath. Hell’s watching someone you love choke on air. It’s trying to hold onto something that can’t hold onto you.  
Your mother wakes only once, and the smile she gives you lights up the whole room. It transforms her face into something alive, the years slide back and before you know it- you’re holding her hand and sobbing out intelligible words into her bedspread. The curve of her hand against your cheek eases everything inside you formerly bound into nasty knots.   
“There was a boy wasn’t there? Something that made all this seem small.” Her smile is kind, like it hasn’t been a year, like shes been patiently waiting to hear all about it.   
“I wouldn’t quantify him as a boy.” It’s out before you can catch yourself, and that hot rush of guilt follows after. Like you’d leave her for a boy.   
“Oh, my diamond girl, I’d expect nothing less.”  
The face you give her makes her laugh, ands its like bells ringing before she quips, “What are you gonna do? Take your heart out and wash it in the rain?” She used to sit in the rain, sometimes for hours, when her and your father fought. When you’d ask her to come in, your small hand wrapping around hers through the cold, she’d always tell you she was washing her heart out in it. Fresh for a new day. That way it couldn’t be tarnished or broken.   
You tell her about Dean. About all the ways he doesn’t matter, proving that he does. She hears the rips in your heart that you ignore. She tells you that love isn’t forgiving, but it should be kind, and while there’s many things between you and Dean, kindness isn’t one of them. But kindness hasn’t done much for your mother either, and it had done nothing for you. You hate her a little, inside, for giving value to worthless things, weak things. For staying. For pretending. Drawing you back in over and over again, tying a noose around your neck and calling it family. Your mouth is burning with all the things you don’t say, the acid of them coats your tongue and you just tell her that you love her before she falls asleep again.   
Your backs complaining about the unyielding of the chair provided and you scratch out a cigarette and almost light it before you remember where you are. There’s such a lack of something to do that it fills you with a black rage, its simmering until you hit an empty hallway and put your fist through the wall, bleeding out the grey fugue you’ve been in. It brings everything back sharp and real and you’re more the sorry for it.  
You flex your fist and twist out the mangled bits, piling pain on pain until the scream of it dies down. You know this, the texture of pain. It can be smooth paint-steady and endless, it can be the jerky stubble of surprise, or the stabbing wrench that takes a life. Soothing in the same way that lit cigarette between your fingers is. Smoke drags into your lungs, oddly hot, and there’s such a false relief to it that you’re almost ashamed. Obliterates that smell of sickly sweet rot, of piss and shit and disinfectant that overrides everything else inside that room. Cigarettes flare up and burn away, one right after another-each one a new excuse to remain outside. Sitting on one of the landscaping surrounds, you’re still too aware out here in the dark, even though you’re safe in your own universe. The stars are so clear they seem like sharp shards of ice, nefarious and removed. You think about Dean and its bitter and too close. You think about your mother and make a thousand different wishes about how this could go different. A thousand promises- exchanges, for her life. For the last good thing, the last step between you and the dark.   
Sometimes, out here in the black, you can pretend that God is kind.  
The thought is pain sharp and glass brittle and you circle arms around yourself to keep it in.  
It’s a cold day in January when you lose her. The funerals ripe with sniffles that don’t come from sadness and red faces that don’t come from tears. Your face is a myriad of seeping blues and purples, the necklace on your throat matches your father’s fingers. You and your father stay at the grave long after everyone has left, the wind cutting between you but neither of you reaches for the other for warmth or comfort.   
Rain falls, but it doesn’t wash your heart clean.   
He reaches for your hands, but the words he uses aren’t warm, “I loved your mother so much. It just didn’t leave any room for you.” He grabs at his chest like the loss is a physical pain, and you watch, detached. “There was always shit that needed to be done, and you were so good at just taking care of it, I ended up being a much better general than a father. And you were a much better soldier than a daughter, and a much better Cain than a sister.”   
Cain. That’s what he liked to call you. Your brother tries to murder you and he calls you Cain. You feel that cold steel of the knife in your hand again, the slippery rush of blood over it, watched the light die in his eyes like the sun going down. The agony in your shoulder where he’d shot you, the burning slice of the knife down your eyebrow after he’d missed. The scar the matched Deans carved by your brother after the gun was empty. Those hollow clicks haunted you. You still couldn’t use a chef’s knife. The relief that your father didn’t have any more “jobs” for you after, prefering to pretend that you died instead. Not his golden boy, not his only son. Didn’t matter that he was a crackhead or that he was so geeked out of his mind that he’d attacked you when you were trying to clean him out.  
That hate travels all the way back to your birth-You imagine the way you must have looked to him back then, womb wet with your birth mother’s lifeblood, then those long months before- shrouded in black at your brother’s funeral. And again- at his second wife’s death, and. Like some harbinger of death, heralding all the great loss in his life.  
You almost reach out, despite everything; some undying corner of your heart loved him still. Despite your mother’s attempts to soften you to it, to him, love never saved anyone. Love was a dog, in spite of you raising it from a puppy, it could bite you viciously any time it wanted. Half extended, your arm lowers like a broken elevator, and there’s no one in the pearl gray sky who can do anything to change it. You wish for monsters again, because monsters mean there’s something after- and your world seems especially hollow now. You’d stopped yourself from ripping off your mothers cross at the viewing, but your fingers had twitched through the fists you had wrapped around your skirts.  
He’s walking away before you can force your feet to follow, but his head turns one last time, “I don’t want to see you again. You’ll get your assignments through someone else from now on.” The fact that he thinks he can hold you, without someone else to bargain with, is laughable; but the sight of his retreating back still stabs something deep. You stare at her grave, all the tender parts she cultivated are weeping, but no tears track down your checks. You wonder if you can hate someone for the blunt knife of kindness. The learning of it and the receipt were never worth the price.  
Deans sitting on your car. You try to blink him away- but he’s there in such a concrete fashion; that you wonder if this is it, the moment where you finally snap. He’s that itch in your brain, somewhere beneath the skin, and it makes you feel diamond sharp. The smile you give him is brittle and has too much teeth, practically a snarl. Whatever look is cutting from your face freezes out whatever he’s going to say. You throw yourself into the car and lock it when he pulls the handle. His raised eyebrow makes you feel childish but you burn rubber out of there anyway.  
Too much. This is all too much. There’s hot tears leaking past your walls and you can’t blink them away. A dam is breaking and you need to find a bottle to shore it up with.


End file.
